e-kolay.net

» see e-kolay.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

For a few years in Turkey you bought the internet the way you bought phone credit. You paid a shop for a number of hours and took the account details home to a modem. That is what e-kolay sold, and its whole marketing problem was not price or speed but the prior question of why a household would want any of it at all.

Doğan Online, the internet arm of the group that owned Hürriyet and Milliyet, launched it in 2000 and hired Kemal Sunal to explain it. Sunal was the most loved comic actor in the country, the man whose village-idiot characters had been on television every holiday for twenty years, and the campaign was directed by Sinan Çetin, who had put him in Propaganda the year before. The films did what the name did: e-kolay, easy. Sunal died on 3 July 2000, the same year the campaign ran, so the brand's introduction to Turkey is preserved in clips of a man who was already gone.

The access business worked while dialing was the only option and evaporated when it was not. ADSL arrived in Turkish homes from around 2005 and Türk Telekom's own retail arm took the market, so e-kolay stopped being a way to get online and became a place to arrive at: webmail, news, horoscopes, recipes, a games section, a women's site called Mahmure, a cinema section with a couple of thousand film pages. In May 2009 the group counted 18 million unique visitors a month across it and was projecting 25 million for the following year.

By 2006 I had TTNet ADSL at home and never dialed a number to reach the internet again. That single household decision, repeated a few million times, is the entire first business model of this company. What I did not do was keep going to the portal, and neither did anyone else. Turkish portals in that decade were a habit formed by the dial-up login page, and once the connection was always on there was no reason to start your day at somebody's front door.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ hours for sale ~

The mechanics are worth writing down because nobody sells connectivity like this anymore. The company bought wholesale capacity from Türk Telekom and resold it in retail units, by the hour or by the year, in packages you could pick up from a corner shop rather than by signing a contract with a telecom company. For a household that had never had a bill from an ISP, that was the difference between trying the internet and not trying it.

It also meant the company had no infrastructure to defend and no way to differentiate once broadband was sold by the line owner directly. The slogan on the front page was hayatın bir tık önünde, one click ahead of life, which reads today like a description of a company that was always exactly one product cycle behind it.

~ the eighteen million ~

The 2009 numbers are real and they are also the trap. Doğan Online was ranked fourth in Turkey by comScore that year, behind two American platform companies and one social network, which sounds like a company in a strong position until you notice that the firms in front of it were about to take every category it made money from. The portal was aggregating recipes and horoscopes on borrowed attention, and the borrowing was about to get expensive.

In 2015 the site was rebuilt around classified listings for household services, plumbers and private tutors, which is a reasonable business and had nothing to do with anything e-kolay had been for fifteen years. Traffic fell through 2016. The Turkish retrospective that tells this story ends it by saying the site was closed in the first months of 2018 because it could no longer get hits.

~ the server error ~

The archive tells it slightly differently, and more bluntly. The last capture that returns a real page is 2 November 2016. From January 2017 onward every capture of the address is nine words of plain HTML: Http/1.1 Service Unavailable. That is not a farewell post or a redirect to a parent company. It is a web server that fell over and was left there for more than a year while somebody worked out whose job it was to turn it off.

The hyphenated address, e-kolay.net, has no DNS record at all today. The unhyphenated one still resolves and issues a permanent redirect to Hürriyet's front page, which by now belongs to Demirören rather than Doğan, the group having sold its media assets in 2018. So the last working piece of Turkey's friendliest dial-up brand is a 301 into a newspaper its builders no longer own.

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