Global Network Navigator

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

~ the obituary ~

gnn sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. by the time i first dialed in from ankara in 1998 the site had been dead for a year and a half and its subscribers were somewhere inside the aol dial-up bundle. o'reilly's whole gnn story happened during a stretch when the commercial web was being invented in a small office in sebastopol, california and the closest most turkish households got to it was reading about the internet in a monthly computer magazine.

gnn launched in may 1993 as a project inside o'reilly & associates. tim o'reilly ran the company, dale dougherty and lisa gansky headed the planning team. dougherty had noticed that mosaic was changing how people used the internet and thought o'reilly's editorial brand could translate to a browser-native publication. the plan was a directory of the interesting things on the still-tiny web, a set of magazine-style features, and a marketplace called gnndirect where partners like lonely planet could sell books over http.

the first clickable banner ad ran on gnn later that year. by june 1995 the site had over 400,000 regular viewers and around 180,000 registered subscribers, which in a world with maybe 15 million people online was a real slice. that was the same month aol paid $11 million for the property in stock and cash. o'reilly took the money and got out of the operating side of the web publishing business. gnn became an aol asset.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

gnn was three things bolted together. it was a directory of the good sites on the web, organized into ten categories, back when the web was small enough that a curated directory made sense. it was a magazine with columns and news and features. and it was a marketplace where a merchant could sell physical goods to somebody with a credit card, over the web, in 1994.

all three of those pieces got fully rebuilt by other people later. yahoo did the directory better and bigger by 1996. hotwired and salon did the magazine better by 1996. amazon did the marketplace better by 1997. gnn had them all first, which is the sort of thing that gets you a footnote rather than a franchise.

~ the fold-in ~

aol had bought gnn to use as a low-cost flat-rate internet service for people who wanted the web without the walled garden. that plan lasted about eighteen months. in october 1996 aol announced its own $19.95 flat-rate pricing on the main service, which made the gnn tier redundant overnight. by december 1996 aol was moving gnn subscribers to aol proper, sunsetting the brand, and taking a charge of up to $75 million against the reorganization. about sixty people on the gnn team lost their jobs.

the actual gnn.com content stayed live for a while after the corporate shutdown, then quietly went away. the domain later drifted through unrelated owners. what remains sits in web archive captures from 1994 and 1995, still showing the small clickable banner at the top of the page for a company that had never advertised on the internet before because nobody had.

~ what carried over ~

gnn's inheritance is mostly indirect. the commercial-web publication template it defined is the thing every content site still runs on. the banner ad it invented turned into an industry. dale dougherty went on to found make magazine and coin the term web 2.0. tim o'reilly went back to books and later did the o'reilly summits that shaped a lot of open-source culture. the actual gnn brand vanished so completely that most people who work on the web today have never heard of it.

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