FORA.tv

» see fora.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

FORA.tv was a video site for the kind of event that used to vanish when the chairs were stacked: a panel at a think tank, a lecture in a university hall. Brian Gruber founded the company in 2005. He had been the first marketing director of C-SPAN, and the name was his choice, fora being the plural of forum.

The method was to record the talk and publish it uncut. Partners included the Aspen Institute and Atlantic Media, and by 2008 the company had deals with a long list of schools and institutions whose public programs it filmed. Revenue came from sponsorships and pay-per-view, shared with the partner that hosted the event. In February 2009 Wired opened a channel on the site for its own talks on technology and science.

Time put FORA.tv on its list of the 50 best websites of 2009, and reviewers called it the C-SPAN of the web. The comparison to TED came up often, with one obvious difference in length: a TED talk ran eighteen minutes and a FORA video ran about an hour. Traffic grew anyway, to around 3 million views a month by September 2010, triple the figure of eighteen months earlier. The library eventually passed 25,000 videos from more than 500 organizations.

~ the dossier ~

~ the round that never closed ~

The money was never large. Hearst and Adobe Ventures put in a $2 million seed round in October 2007, and a second $2 million followed in May 2008. TechCrunch noted that Gruber had hoped to close $5 million more by that January and was about $3 million short. His answer was "Everyone has trouble closing the round until they close the round." The same article called web video for intellectuals a hard sell and named Big Think as the competition.

Over the following years the company leaned on the other half of its business, filming and streaming events for paying clients. By 2018 the site's navigation was a services menu, live streaming at the top and post-production further down, with Watch Events as one link in the footer.

~ american rooms ~

In 2009 I was at university in Turkey with a ttnet line that could finally carry video, which is about as close to the intended audience as anyone gets, and FORA.tv never crossed my screen. The library came out of American rooms, the Aspen Institute and the campus lecture circuit, and what reached Turkey from that world was the eighteen-minute version on TED.

~ $50,251 for the links ~

The end was a page titled Library Takedown. "Thanks for visiting! We have taken down the FORA.tv Library as of Aug. 31, 2018. If you would like to view a specific video, please contact the appropriate organization directly." The copyright line under it stopped at 2017. What remained of the site advertised video production and mentioned "25,000+ videos produced" in passing, and from March 2019 the domain stopped answering crawlers at all.

The registration lapsed, and on 9 January 2023 fora.tv sold at GoDaddy Auctions for $50,251. The domain-trade blog TLD Investors explained the price with Ahrefs numbers: 460,000 backlinks from 11,000 websites, left behind by years of people citing lectures. Today fora.tv forwards to Deletionpedia, an archive of articles deleted from Wikipedia. The talks survive where the host organizations kept their own copies, and on the company's old YouTube channel.

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