FortuneCity

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

~ the goodbye ~

fortunecity's peak years overlap with my dial-up era but it was not where i ended up. by the late nineties the turkish free-host habit was using whatever international service had a turkish-friendly interface or whatever forum had an "uploads" folder, and most of my early-internet output was forum signatures with a hardware list rather than full personal homepages. fortunecity was the british peer to geocities for people who wanted a themed-city url and the small status of being "in capitol hill" or "marina del rey" on a free public host.

richard jones and dan metcalfe founded fortunecity in 1997. the company was british-run but operated out of new york, with a model lifted directly from geocities. you picked a themed city and got a free homepage with a few megabytes of storage. the site monetized through ad banners and pop-ups, escalating to a small floating ad layer that follow-you-around-the-page-style adtech later evolved out of. fortunecity went public in march 1998 in an ipo that was significantly oversubscribed. by 1999 it had partnered with warner brothers on acmecity, an offshoot host where users could build sites with looney tunes and dc comics characters without copyright takedowns. at peak it served about a million users.

the slow part was the post-dot-com decade. once geocities itself died in 2009, free-host economics stopped working for anyone except a handful of regional holdouts. fortunecity's owner dotster announced in late march 2012 that all free accounts would be deleted on april 30. archive team scrambled to back up what it could before the cutoff, and on the deletion day every free user site went dark at once. the wayback machine has partial coverage, but acmecity was deleted in the same sweep.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

fortunecity rode the same wave geocities did, just from a british origin and with the themed-city metaphor pushed further. when you signed up you picked a "city" that fit your interest area, then picked a "neighborhood" inside it. you got a homepage url like /capitolhill/government/2456/. the cities were branded but the neighborhoods were just numbered folders, which gave the whole system the same feel as choosing a username on a forum that had been around too long. for british and irish users especially, fortunecity was a more comfortable default than the american alternatives.

~ what got buried with it ~

the april 30, 2012 mass deletion took a million-odd small homepages with it. many were dormant. the active ones included fan archives that had been built up over a decade, plus the only public copies certain community projects had ever had. forever knight wiki and several other fan archives later catalogued how much of their early content lived only on fortunecity urls. archive.org has some of it. fanlore.org has a writeup. dotster meanwhile rebranded the domain as a small paid-hosting service that never recovered the volume.

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