Daylife

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

~ the obit ~

Daylife sold pipes. If a newspaper wanted a page about Syria that filled itself with wire photographs and a running list of related links, Daylife would build that page and keep it fed, and the newspaper's readers would never see the name. The client list ran to USA Today, NPR, Sky News, Forbes and Thomson Reuters. The engine chewed through more than a hundred thousand content feeds, most of them licensed rather than scraped, which is the part that made it sellable.

Upendra Shardanand founded the company in New York in 2006 and released the developer APIs in 2008. Getty Images put in $4 million in September 2009 and the two shipped Smart Galleries together that same month. The total raised is reported as $12.3 million by TechCrunch and $15 million by Wikipedia; the investor list is the same either way, with Balderton Capital, Arts Alliance and The New York Times in it, alongside angels including Michael Arrington and Dave Winer. In January 2010 Shardanand posted that the API had passed a billion calls in a month. By July 2011 it was past 1.5 billion.

NewsCred bought the company on 17 October 2012 for an undisclosed sum. Shafqat Islam, NewsCred's chief executive, said Daylife's cloud publishing products "will continue to work uninterrupted and seamlessly", which held for about nine months. The last capture of a working Daylife homepage, titled "Daylife - Simply amazing cloud publishing", is 5 August 2013. The first capture of daylife.com answering with a permanent redirect to newscred.com is 2 January 2014. Three captures sit inside that gap and all three come back unreadable from the archive today, so the year is the closest anyone is going to get.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the smart everything ~

The product line was named the way 2009 named things: Smart Topics and Smart Galleries, under something called the Daylife Publisher Suite. A Smart Topic was a page about one subject that kept itself current without an editor touching it. Smart Sections did the same job at the size of a whole vertical. Getty's investment and the launch of the galleries were announced together, because the galleries were a way to put Getty's inventory onto other people's pages and bill for it.

None of this was consumer software, which is why a company handling a billion monthly API calls left so little public memory behind. The people who touched it were building somebody else's website, and when the contract moved to a different vendor there was nothing for a reader to miss.

~ the citation ~

Wikipedia says the company shut down in 2016 and footnotes it to an archived page reading "Buy this domain". The page it links is dailylife.com, the Australian women's site Fairfax Media ran, not daylife.com. One letter of difference, and the only date anyone cites for this company's death was taken from the wrong company.

~ the cname ~

daylife.com has an A record on Amazon nameservers and answers nothing on either port. www.daylife.com is a different story. It is still a CNAME pointing at newscred.com, which resolves onto Fastly, which replies with "Fastly error: unknown domain: www.daylife.com. Please check that this domain has been added to a service."

NewsCred did not survive as a name either. It sold its content services arm to Industry Dive in October 2020 and rebranded what was left as Welcome. Optimizely bought Welcome on 6 December 2021. newscred.com redirects to optimizely.com now. The DNS record aiming the dead brand at its buyer has outlived the buyer's brand too.

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