CiaoWeb

» see ciaoweb.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ciao is the same word coming and going. Italians say it when they arrive and they say it when they leave, and the only thing that tells you which one you are hearing is the direction the person is walking. Fiat put that word on a web portal in December 1999 and meant it as a greeting.

CiaoWeb went live on 18 December 1999, eight days before a millennium everyone was nervous about, out of a joint venture between the Fiat group and IFIL called Ciaoholding. The number attached to it was two hundred billion lire, roughly a hundred million euro, and the ambition was stated openly: Italy was going to get its own Yahoo, and the family that built the country's cars would be the one to supply it. Paolo Ceretti ran it from the IFIL side and Maurizio Olivotto came across from Fiat as the technical lead. At the end of 2000 they hired Massimo Donelli away from the editorship of Panorama to run the content.

What you got at the address was the full 1999 checklist. Free access to the internet at the front with a search box beside it, then news and market prices, a shopping arm, somewhere to talk, and a free mail account ending in ciaoweb.it. Behind the pages sat seventy servers at the Assago headquarters outside Milan, sixty of them running Windows NT and ten running Unix, all of it built on BroadVision, which was the expensive answer to that problem in 1999 and is one of the reasons the costs never came down.

Fiat is not an abstract word in Turkey. Tofaş had been building them in Bursa since 1971, and the results were on every road: the Murat 124 first, the Şahin and the Kartal later. In Ankara in 1999 a fifteen-year-old on a 33.6k line knew exactly what Fiat was, and it was a car in the street rather than a company that might build him a homepage. Nobody in Turkey heard about CiaoWeb and there was no reason anybody would have. But the mismatch is the part worth keeping, because that same mismatch is roughly what happened inside Italy too.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The pitch was synergy, and on paper it was not stupid. Fiat and IFIL between them owned the newspaper La Stampa and the travel operator Alpitour, with Ferrari sitting in the group alongside both, and a portal on top of all that could sell holidays to the same visitor it had just sold a front page to. Through the 2000 and 2001 seasons CiaoWeb was the technical sponsor of Juventus, which put the name in front of the only audience in Italy larger than a national newspaper's.

None of it converted. Italian online advertising in 2000 was a market that had been announced rather than built, and the editorial operation was expensive in the way a magazine is expensive, with a staff of around a hundred and fifty at Assago and another hundred consultants on top. The first full year closed with forty-five billion lire of losses against twenty-five billion of revenue, which is the kind of ratio that only survives while the parent still believes the story.

~ the unraveling ~

Fiat stopped believing it during 2001, and Fiat had bigger problems by then than a website. The group was heading into the crisis that would end with General Motors holding a piece of it, and a hundred-million-euro internet bet with no revenue was the easiest line on the page to cut. CiaoHolding went to Hachette Rusconi Interactif at the end of 2001, and a new and much smaller version of the portal came online on 20 November 2001 under publisher ownership.

That is the real date of death and the site never admitted it. What Rusconi bought was a brand and a mail list, and what they ran was a magazine publisher's idea of a portal, with fewer pages and cheaper graphics and none of the ambition that had justified the original number. When Hearst acquired Hachette Rusconi in 2011 they inherited it without appearing to notice.

~ the long tail ~

The decade between the sale and the switch-off is the strange part. By February 2010 the Italian trade press was reporting CiaoWeb at something around a hundred unique visitors a day, which for a property that had cost two hundred billion lire is close to a rounding error against zero. It kept serving pages anyway, because the hosting was cheap and the address was already paid for and nobody at Hearst Magazines Italia had a reason to file the paperwork.

It finally went off in March 2012, twelve years and three months after launch, ten of those years spent as a shell wearing the name of something that had already stopped. The domain does not resolve now. What is left is a handful of promotional radios and stickers with ciaoweb.it printed on them, still turning up on Italian classified sites, which is a fairly honest afterlife for a portal built by a company that knew how to make objects and did not know how to make this.

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