Ciao

» see ciao.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

for about fifteen years there was a european internet where writing four paragraphs about a washing machine paid you money. not much of it. roughly a euro for a review other members actually opened, a little more for filling in a market research questionnaire. ciao ran that economy across seven countries and turkey was not one of them.

the portal came out of munich. frederick paul started it in the summer of 1999 with max cartellieri and verena mohaupt, it went live that november, and in february 2000 it merged with a competitor called amiro.de into one company. germany was the home market and britain was the second one. by the middle of the decade the network claimed something like 26 million visitors a month across europe, which for a site about the relative merits of vacuum cleaners is a serious number.

the mechanic was the whole product. you wrote about something you owned, other members rated the review, and your rating decided what your writing earned per read. people tracked those earnings the way they now track revenue on a channel. it was small money and it was real money at the same time, and it produced a body of writing about consumer goods that no unpaid comment section has matched since.

none of it reached me. the model needed local merchants feeding price data in and a local advertising market willing to pay for shopping traffic, and around 2003 turkey had neither at that size. when i wanted an opinion on a graphics card i read a turkish forum thread, which paid nobody anything and never pretended otherwise.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually paid ~

payment was per read rather than per post, and that changed what people wrote. a review nobody opened earned nothing, so the good reviewers learned to write titles and first lines that pulled traffic, years before most of them would have called that seo. members also took surveys for anywhere between 25 cents and ten euros.

the surveys are the reason the company kept getting bought. the reviews were the shop window. the asset was several million europeans who had already agreed to answer questions about what they purchased.

~ the owners ~

greenfield online, an american market research firm, bought ciao in 2005 for 154 million dollars. microsoft bought greenfield online in august 2008 for around 486 million, largely to pull shopping comparison data into its search business at the moment it was assembling what became bing. that fit lasted under four years. in march 2012 the french comparison shopping group leguide took ciao off microsoft's hands, and the site spent its last stretch owned by a company far smaller than the two before it.

~ the actual end ~

on 27 november 2017 ciao told members that all payments would stop on 1 december. four days of notice on an income some of them had been earning for over a decade. the sites themselves went off early in 2018.

ciao.de resolves to a shop search engine now and none of the reviews sit under it. eighteen years of europeans explaining exactly what was wrong with their dishwashers, written for money, thrown out by an owner with no use for the archive.

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