eSnips

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

~ the last words ~

eSnips arrived through search results rather than through a signup page. You typed a song title into Google somewhere in the second half of the 2000s and one of the links went to a stranger's public folder with a small player already sitting on it. I never made an account and I doubt most of the traffic did. That is the honest shape of my contact with this site, and it is also the honest shape of its business: a service whose community features were the pitch and whose search rankings were the product.

The company was founded in Herzliya in 2004 by Yael Elish with Alon Elish as technical lead, joined by Nahum Sharfman, who had already built Shopping.com. The design idea was good. You got storage for any file type, and every folder could be public or private or open by invitation, with tags pulling the public ones into microportals around whatever people were into. Some of those communities were real, with karaoke and hand crafts among the busier ones. Gemini and Greylock put in five and a half million dollars across a seed round in early 2006 and a Series A that November.

By March 2008 the site was pulling 9.1 million unique visitors a month. Almost none of that had anything to do with poetry.

~ the record ~

~ the music problem ~

EMI made contact in October 2007 about the copyrighted material sitting in all those public folders. The company did the responsible thing and licensed Audible Magic, the fingerprinting system that listens to an upload and matches it against a database of known recordings, and switched it on in February 2008.

It was too good at its job. Users reported it blocking original compositions, and some found it rejecting everything they submitted including recordings with no music in them at all, just speech. So the filter removed the reason people came and kept annoying the people who had stayed for the reasons the founders intended. Traffic went from 9.1 million uniques in March to 5.7 million by November.

~ the arithmetic of the sale ~

Both founders were pushed out in February 2008 and Sharfman took over as chief executive. On 1 November 2008 the company sold to the Logia Group for roughly seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, against five and a half million raised. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the sale price went straight to EMI as a settlement, so the investors got back about half a million.

That is a Web 2.0 story in one line of arithmetic. The valuable asset was traffic the company could not legally keep, and the moment it made itself legal it was worth less than the money that had gone in.

~ the day it went quiet ~

Under Logia the site ran on for four more years as an advertising-loaded gallery, still serving the same folders, still indexed. Nothing was announced and nothing was migrated. The last working copy in the Internet Archive is from 11 March 2013, and after that the crawler stops finding a site at all. The domain does not resolve today.

Everything anybody had put in those folders since 2005 went with it, which by then was the normal ending. The interesting part is the order of events. The settlement was paid and the filter did exactly what it was bought to do, and the site died anyway. It just took four extra years and left nobody around to write the notice.

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