Ekolay

» see ekolay.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

My dial-up account came from somewhere else, but the commercials were unavoidable. Doğan Online launched e-kolay.net in 1999 and put Kemal Sunal in front of a computer on national television to explain that this internet thing was easy, which is what the name says in Turkish. He died on 3 July 2000. The ads are still the first thing people bring up when the name surfaces, a quarter century later, on whatever platform is hosting the nostalgia that week.

The product underneath the campaign was an internet service provider first. You dialed e-kolay to get online, and the portal was what waited for you when you arrived. By late 2004 the access business had stopped making sense, since free mail and free search had shown up from Google and Microsoft and nobody needed to buy a homepage along with their connection. Doğan dropped the ISP and kept the portal.

It worked for a long time. In May 2009 the company put its traffic at 18 million monthly unique visitors and ranked itself fourth among the most-used sites in Turkey. The three above it were all American. The group's newspapers filled the news and sports pages at no marginal cost, and around them sat a games section and a women's vertical called Mahmure that pulled three million monthly visitors on its own. The free email address was the part people actually kept.

~ the record ~

~ the portal years ~

Ekolay belonged to a category that made complete sense in 2001 and none at all by 2011. A portal was where you started, because search was bad and links were how you found anything, so the value was in being the page your browser opened to. Doğan Online had a newspaper group behind it, which meant Ekolay could fill that page with Hürriyet and Milliyet copy for free, then sell the resulting audience to advertisers who were already buying print.

What broke it was that people stopped starting anywhere. Facebook arrived in Turkish in 2008 and by the early 2010s the daily habit had moved there. The Hürriyet piece celebrating Ekolay's tenth year in 2009 named Facebook as the site directly above it in the rankings, which reads now like a note the company left for itself.

~ the second life ~

In January 2014 Doğan relaunched the domain as something else entirely. The new ekolay.net matched tradesmen with customers, a services marketplace trading on a brand name that still meant "easy" to anyone over thirty. Webrazzi covered it on 9 January 2014 under a headline calling the old site a legend of its era, which is the tone Turkish tech press uses for things it has already buried.

That version lasted about two years. The archive shows it serving its own pages through late 2015 and answering with a redirect by June 2016.

~ where the domain goes now ~

Type ekolay.net into a browser in 2026 and you land on hurriyet.com.tr. The redirect has been in place for most of a decade and Doğan has kept paying for the name the whole time, which costs almost nothing and keeps someone else from putting a betting site behind a word that a generation of Turkish television attached to a comedian and a desktop computer.

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