Clix

» see clix.pt as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Clix was Portugal-only at the dial tone layer, which is the layer that decides everything else. It launched on 27 October 1999, built by Novis, the telecom company inside the Sonae group, and it arrived as two things bolted together: an internet provider that charged nothing for access, and a portal to land on once you were connected.

The slogan was fazer clix custa nix, roughly that clicking costs nothing, and it was literally true. You dialed in over a modem, you paid your phone company for the minutes, and Novis took its share of that call instead of billing you a subscription. The portal came with a mailbox and ten megabytes of free hosting, and it opened with twelve content channels covering news and computing and classifieds and the rest, built out with something like twenty specialist partners.

It worked immediately. By July 2001 Clix was the second most visited website in Portugal, behind SAPO and ahead of everything else. Over the next decade the provider underneath grew into a full operator, adding ADSL as Clix Turbo in September 2002, television over IP in 2006, and fiber in September 2008. That growth is also what ended it. Novis merged its consumer business into Optimus in January 2010, Optimus merged with ZON in 2013, and the combined company became NOS in May 2014. Each step took a piece of the name.

The portal outlived the brand it was named after by about sixteen months. On 15 September 2015, more than a year after the telecom side had finished becoming NOS, clix.pt stopped. The webmail was kept alive for the people who still had addresses on it. Everything else was pointed at another company's portal.

~ the dossier ~

~ free access, paid call ~

The arrangement Clix launched on was a Western European invention of 1998 and 1999. Freeserve did it in Britain first and half the continent copied it within eighteen months. The provider stops charging a subscription and instead takes a cut of the per-minute revenue the incumbent phone company collects while you are online. Your bill does not go away. It moves.

In Turkey I met the same years from the other side of that arrangement. The provider took a subscription and the phone company took the minutes, and the two bills arrived separately, which made the cost of being online extremely visible in a way a single phone bill does not. That difference sounds like accounting and it is not. Free access is what pushed a whole country onto one portal in under two years, because the barrier to trying it was a phone call.

~ what the portal was for ~

The mailbox and the ten megabytes are the part worth pointing at. A portal like this was not competing on content, it was competing on being the place your identity lived. Once your address ended in the provider's domain and your personal page sat on their hosting, you were not going anywhere, and the twelve channels of news and classifieds were there to give you a reason to open the browser at all.

That model held for about a decade everywhere it was tried. Then webmail moved to Google, hosting moved to anyone with a template, and a portal was left holding a homepage nobody had set as their homepage in years.

~ absorbed twice ~

Clix did not fail. It was consumed in stages by mergers happening above it, and each merger had a good reason that had nothing to do with the portal. Novis needed scale, so it went into Optimus and the brand became Optimus Clix. Optimus needed to match a cable competitor, so it went into ZON. The result needed one name, so it took NOS.

What is left is a webmail service outliving the company, the network, and the front page. Portugal kept SAPO, which is the version of this story where the portal is the parent rather than the attachment, and that is most of the difference between the two.

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