Epidemic Marketing

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

~ the obit ~

Seven point six million dollars of venture capital raised, one point six million of it spent on thirty seconds of Super Bowl airtime. That is a fifth of everything the company ever had, gone in half a minute, five months after opening the doors. Four months after that it was out of business.

Epidemic Marketing started in Denver in September 1999 under Kelly Wanser as president and chief executive, with a proposition that reads today like a description of a botnet and read at the time like a business plan. You installed their software into your mail program. It attached a small graphical advertisement to the bottom of everything you sent. When one of your correspondents clicked it and bought something, you got a cut. The company's own summary of itself, sitting in the meta description of its front page, was that Epidemic uses e-commerce technology to bring the opportunities of e-commerce to consumers through their email. It contains the phrase twice and explains nothing.

The idea has an obvious hole and Salon put a finger straight through it on 3 February 2000, four days after the Super Bowl. The person receiving the mail never agreed to any of this and had no way to opt out. Your friend was now being paid, in principle, for writing to you, and the more he wrote the more he made. The piece called it a new form of spam wearing a friendly face, and worried out loud about what happens when somebody points the thing at a mailing list.

The distance on this one is total and it is worth saying why rather than leaving it at geography. Epidemic never had a product that a person outside the United States could meaningfully use, because the commissions were paid on purchases from American merchants. Its one moment of mass visibility was a slot in a broadcast nobody here watched. Super Bowl XXXIV was played on 30 January 2000, and in Turkey that was a thing you might stumble on very late at night on a satellite channel while looking for something else. The company spent a fifth of its money speaking to an audience, and when the thirty seconds ended it had five months left.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ epinabler ~

The software was called epiNabler, which is a name that could not have been produced in any other eighteen-month window in history. You downloaded it and it hooked into Outlook or Eudora, and there was a version that worked with Hotmail in the browser. From then on it wrote itself into the bottom of your outgoing mail without further prompting.

The company never published the commission rate. Salon noted at the time that the site did not reveal how much of a cut you were getting, which for a service whose entire pitch was that you get paid is a remarkable thing to leave off the page. There was an option to route your earnings to a charity instead, which reads now like the tell: if a scheme offers you the chance to not take the money, the money was never the size of the promise.

~ what is left in the index ~

Every ad Epidemic stapled to an email pointed back at a URL of the form epidemic.com with a query string reading emid and a five-digit number. The emid was the member. It was how the company knew whose mail the click had come out of, and it is the only part of the operation that still physically exists. The Wayback index holds around a hundred and twenty distinct emid links, harvested off pages that quoted or archived somebody's email years ago, each one a fossil of a specific person who signed up to be paid for writing to their friends.

The front page under Epidemic was captured exactly four times, the first on 29 February 2000 and the last on 21 June, and after that the address passed through other hands and is a parking lander today. That last capture is a browser sniffer and nothing else, thirty lines of JavaScript checking for Netscape 3 and for IE 3 on a Mac before redirecting to the page that actually had the content on it. The company had tried to merge with a firm in California. When that fell apart it closed, and about sixty people went home.

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