Download Squad

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

~ the goodbye ~

I had TTNet broadband at home from around 2006 and a feed reader open most of the day, and the English-language software blogs were how anyone outside the American tech press found out what was worth installing. Download Squad sat in that slot for years. It covered the free thing rather than the expensive thing, which mattered a great deal more from Ankara than it did from San Francisco.

The site launched in 2005 as one of the Weblogs Inc titles, the network Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey had built as a portfolio of narrow blogs each aimed at one obsession. AOL bought the whole network in October 2005 for somewhere around $25 million. Download Squad went along with Engadget, Autoblog, Joystiq and the rest, and kept doing what it had been doing, which was several posts a day about whatever software or browser extension had just appeared.

It ran that way for six years and by every account it was profitable and well read. Then in February 2011 AOL bought The Huffington Post for $315 million and put Arianna Huffington in charge of everything it published. The property list went under review within weeks.

On 12 April 2011 the writers were told by letter that their services were no longer required. Switched.com got the same letter in the same round.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it covered ~

The beat was free software, and that was a genuinely difficult beat to monetize. A site reviewing $500 applications gets affiliate revenue and vendor advertising. A site reviewing an open-source image editor and somebody's weekend Firefox extension gets neither, no matter how many people read it.

What it got instead was loyalty, because the audience it served was people who wanted to fix something without paying for it. That crowd was disproportionately outside the United States, on slower connections and smaller budgets, and Download Squad was one of the few American tech sites that wrote as though those readers existed.

~ the AOL Way ~

Two months before the shutdown, an internal AOL document leaked describing a content strategy built on production quotas and traffic scoring for every article. It landed badly with the writers, and the shutdowns that followed the Huffington Post deal read like the same logic applied to whole sites instead of individual posts.

The surviving titles were the ones with a clean advertising category attached. Engadget had consumer electronics, Autoblog had cars, Joystiq had games, TUAW had Apple. Download Squad's category was software you did not have to buy, which is not a category any media buyer has a budget line for. Switched.com went in the same round for the same reason.

~ the archive ~

AOL did not delete the site on the day it fired the staff. Download Squad stayed online with no new posts for three and a half years, still collecting search traffic from six years of reviews, still answering at its own URLs. That is the ordinary outcome for a dead blog owned by a large company, and it is a decent one, because the value of a software review is mostly in being findable later.

In December 2014 that ended. AOL rewrote the redirects so that every downloadsquad.com address, no matter how specific, landed on the front page of Engadget. A link to a 2008 review of some abandoned utility now resolved to today's phone news. The site had been dead for years by then, but that was the day it stopped being readable.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »