DIY Life

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

~ the last words ~

AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. for a reported $25 million in October 2005 and inherited a machine for manufacturing blogs. Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey had built it in 2003 with Mark Cuban's money on a simple premise: pick a subject narrow enough that nobody else was covering it daily, hire two people who cared about it, and let the search traffic accumulate. DIY Life launched on 31 July 2007 as one of those, covering home projects and repairs, with a steady side channel of product safety recalls.

It was competent and it was ordinary, which is what the model wanted. Someone posted three ways to reuse paint sample cards. Someone else wrote a buying guide on linoleum kitchen flooring. There was no house style to speak of beyond a friendly voice and a photograph at the top, and for four years that was enough to hold an audience of people who had a Saturday and a hardware store nearby.

Then AOL bought The Huffington Post in February 2011 for $315 million and put Arianna Huffington in charge of everything. The old Weblogs properties were pulled under a new Huffington Post Media Group and the count of content brands was cut to about twenty. Blogs that were not on that list were told to stop filing during the summer, described internally as a hiatus, a word chosen because it does not require anyone to announce a closure.

The archive shows what a hiatus really looked like. The last story on diylife.com is dated 16 September 2011, and the front page never changed after that. On 20 September, Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge published a piece on the DIY movement that opened by calling it her first post at StyleList Home, which is where the subject had been moved while the old site sat there still serving.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The Weblogs model worked by volume. AOL ran dozens of these things at once, each one cheap, each one aimed at a slice of search demand, and the network as a whole was worth far more than any single title. That also meant no single title could argue for itself when the spreadsheet changed.

DIY Life was in the lifestyle cluster with Slashfood, Luxist, ParentDish and StyleList, all of which were being weighed against each other in 2011. Some were closed outright. Others kept a name while losing everything behind it.

~ the memo ~

Writers across the network were told to cease posting as of 1 August 2011. The instruction went out under a category label that did not name individual blogs, so nobody outside could say precisely which sites were included, and coverage at the time hedged accordingly. That vagueness was the point of using the word hiatus.

Publishing actually continued into September on this one, which is the usual gap between a decision and its execution when nobody has been told to make an announcement.

~ where the traffic went ~

diylife.com kept serving its own front page until at least 6 December 2011. Ten days later it was answering with a permanent redirect to stylelist.com/home, and it went on doing that for years afterward, long enough that the redirect outlived StyleList as an independent brand too. AOL Style is what sits at the end of that chain today.

I never read it. Home improvement blogging was an American suburban genre that assumed a garage and a hardware chain open on Sunday. Read from an apartment in Ankara it would have been a tour of somebody else's building code.

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