Gather.com

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

~ the obituary ~

in 2005 i was a university student in ankara, on ttnet broadband by the next year, and my internet ran through msn windows and turkish forums. gather was an american living room i was never in. it was built for grown-ups in the states who wanted to talk about news and culture somewhere calmer than the comment sections, and it paid them a little for the trouble.

tom gerace, who had earlier built the affiliate-marketing company be free, started gather in 2005 in boston. the pitch that made it interesting was the reward points. write a post, get read, earn gather points you could cash toward gift cards. it was one of the first sites to treat member writing as something worth paying for, however lightly, and real money lined up behind it, from hearst to mcgraw-hill.

it never became huge, but it had a genuine adult audience, enough that starbucks partnered with it to reach exactly those readers. the news channel ran until 2014, when gather inc. was sold to a company called kitara media. after that it emptied out fast, and by october 2015 the site was defunct. the paid-writing experiment did not survive the change of hands.

~ the case file ~

~ the idea ~

paying people to write on your platform sounds obvious now and was strange then. gather sat in the gap between the old world, where a magazine paid a few professionals, and the new one, where blogs and social media got millions to write for free. it guessed that the middle might hold, that ordinary members would show up for small rewards and stay for the conversation. the guess was half right, which is usually not enough.

~ how it actually ended ~

gather did not blow up, it got sold and quietly emptied. content sites that pay their contributors run on thin margins, and once the money behind it wanted out, the writing was on the wall for the writing. helium and squidoo, the other pay-per-post communities of that era, mostly met the same end, undone by the same math and by google deciding their content was not worth ranking. gather just did it earlier and with better manners.

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