Dlisted

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

~ the eulogy ~

Michael Kuroiwa had a full-time job at an internet company in 2005 and started writing about celebrities during the slow parts of the day. The site went up on 23 January 2005 under the name the D-List. He changed it to Dlisted because that domain was free, and later joked that it was a copyright problem with Kathy Griffin. He left his surname off it for a while, for the obvious reason that he was writing most of it from the office.

None of the people it covered were famous in Turkey in any deep way. Turkish celebrity coverage in those years was a television and magazine business with its own cast, and the English-language gossip blog ran on a specifically American supply chain of tabloid photo agencies and reality television. What crossed over was the format rather than the subject matter, and by the time it crossed over it was on Instagram instead of on a blog.

The tagline was "Be Very Afraid." The site ran a Hot Slut of the Day that built toward a Hot Slut of the Year vote. It also gave its subjects names that stuck harder than their real ones. Prince Harry was Prince Hot Ginge for years, and Kris Jenner was Pimp Mama Kris. Readers who never once read a post could recognize the nicknames, which is a strange kind of reach for a one-man blog.

By 2007 it was doing more than a million hits a day and the advertising was enough that Kuroiwa quit the job. He hired writers eventually and still put up at least one post himself every day for most of eighteen years. A podcast started in August 2018 with the site contributor Allison Davey. Then on 23 June 2023 he announced the site would close for good on the thirtieth, and it did.

~ the dossier ~

~ the voice ~

The whole product was one person's register, which readers described as snarky and unforgiving and which was closer to affectionate cruelty than to reporting. Dlisted rarely broke anything. It reacted, in a voice that treated the entire apparatus of celebrity as beneath contempt while covering it every single day, and the joke was that the contempt never once looked like it might result in the writer stopping.

~ what the ad money did ~

Kuroiwa was clear in interviews that he had never promoted the site and never advertised it. It grew because his friends forwarded it, and it converted to a job because display advertising in the late 2000s paid enough for one man with a million daily hits to live on. That window was narrow. The blogs that opened at the same time and tried to become companies, Gawker most visibly, ended up with payrolls they had to feed. Dlisted stayed small enough that the founder could keep deciding what it was.

Staying small is also what made it unsellable. A property whose value is a voice cannot be handed to a buyer, because what the buyer receives is an archive plus an audience that came for a person who is no longer writing.

~ the goodbye post ~

The farewell was titled "Dlisted (2005-2023)" and went up on the last day. In a podcast episode a few days later Kuroiwa said he was burned out after years of producing content on that schedule, and that he had tried to sell the site and realized it would not be the same under anyone else. He shut it rather than let it be run by somebody who did not have the voice.

That is a rarer ending than it sounds. Most blogs from that class either got acquired and hollowed out or simply stopped updating until the domain lapsed. Dlisted picked a date a week in advance and hit it.

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