DailyFinance

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

~ the obituary ~

DailyFinance went into beta on 10 February 2009, which was a strange month to start a business news site. The S&P had lost half its value in seventeen months and the audience for stock coverage was either terrified or wiped out. AOL launched anyway, because AOL in 2009 was building a portfolio of destination sites the way a magazine group builds titles, and money was the biggest category it did not own.

The premise was a hybrid. Take the immediacy and the loose voice of blogs, staple it to real financial reporting, and run the whole thing on Blogsmith, the publishing system AOL had acquired with Weblogs Inc. It sat inside a stable that included WalletPop for consumer spending and BloggingStocks for market chatter, all three built on the same rails and pointed at slightly different readers.

Seven years later, on 26 May 2016, the site served its last real front page at around five in the morning UTC. By that evening dailyfinance.com was returning a 301 to aol.com/finance and never came back. Nothing was announced. The domain still resolves today and lands, after a couple of hops, on a Yahoo Finance portfolio page.

~ the case file ~

~ the content machine ~

DailyFinance is inseparable from what AOL was doing to publishing in those years. Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive two months after launch and spent the next stretch buying and building sites at volume, a strategy the leaked internal playbook of February 2011 described in terms that embarrassed everyone who read it. Editorial output was planned against search demand and traffic targets before it was planned against anything else.

The Huffington Post purchase in February 2011 for $315 million was the turn. AOL put Arianna Huffington in charge of all its editorial and started closing or absorbing the sites that did not fit, and in the UK, WalletPop and DailyFinance were replaced by a single AOL Money property that October. The American DailyFinance survived that round, which is why it lasted another four and a half years while its sisters did not.

~ the banner on the last page ~

The final capture of the site is worth reading closely. Above the headlines sits a division called migration-banner with an image file named weremoving.png and one line of text: soon your Portfolio, quotes and all the information you need to save, invest and more will be available on AOL.com. It had been up for a while. The site was telling its readers where it was going for weeks before it went.

That is a more honest ending than most sites get. Verizon had closed on AOL in June 2015 for $4.4 billion, the cuts came through in February 2016, and the surviving plan was to stop running twenty brands and run one. DailyFinance was not killed by a competitor or by a collapse in traffic. It was consolidated, which is the corporate word for being folded into a directory on a bigger domain.

I never had an AOL account and neither did anyone I knew. In Turkey the ISP was TTNet and AOL was a thing you saw in American films, a CD in a magazine somebody's cousin had brought back. The odd part of DailyFinance is that it was competing against CNN Money and TheStreet on the open web, where any of us could read it, and I still cannot remember it. It was a good site nobody had a reason to bookmark.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »