GoFish

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

~ the goodbye ~

Michael Downing started GoFish in San Francisco in 2003 as a search engine for digital media, which at the time meant music files and ringtones. It listed on the OTC bulletin board rather than going through a proper offering, which is a detail worth keeping, because it means the company's later years are documented in filings instead of in press releases.

Then YouTube happened and GoFish became a video-sharing site, which by the end of its run had close to twenty million users. That number never turned into money. Hosting other people's video was the most expensive business on the web in 2007 and the only companies surviving it were the ones with a search engine or a telco underneath. In 2008 the company repositioned again, this time toward children's and family content, on the reasonable theory that brand-safe inventory sells at a better rate.

In January 2009 it stopped hosting video at all and relaunched as Betawave, an advertising network representing a portfolio of gaming and parenting sites. It had raised $22.5 million the previous December, most of which went to clearing debt. On 4 November 2010 TechCrunch reported it had run out of money. The line management gave was that it had made it through most of the year without reaching profitability.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pivot ledger ~

Each turn was a sane response to a real problem. Media search was a losing fight against Google and video hosting was a losing fight against bandwidth, so the company kept walking downhill toward whatever was cheaper to operate. Kids' content at least sold inventory advertisers wanted. The ad network was what remained once it had given up on owning anything.

Four positions in seven years reads less like indecision than like a small company being pushed along by larger ones, landing each time slightly further from anything a user would recognize.

~ the publishers who were still owed ~

The part that deserves recording is who absorbed the failure. Betawave sold ads on behalf of small independent sites, and when it collapsed some of them had been waiting six months to be paid. They had kept serving the ads through that, hoping a merger with Realgirlsmedia would close and unlock the money. It did not close.

That is the difference between a representation firm going under and a product shutting down. The users lose a bookmark, the publishers lose a payroll.

~ what youtube cost everybody else ~

GoFish belongs to a cohort that ran the same arc between 2005 and 2012. Veoh went bankrupt and Revver sold for parts, while Blip and Metacafe each spent years narrowing what they did until there was nothing distinctive left. Google was willing to run a video business at a loss for as long as it took, and none of these companies could match that.

The Turkish view of this was an accident of timing. YouTube was blocked here from May 2008 until October 2010, almost exactly the window in which GoFish became Betawave and then ran out of money, and the usual response was changing your DNS servers rather than going to find a different video site. When people did want a domestic one they used Izlesene. The decade's biggest video war ran straight past a country where its winner was officially unreachable and its American rivals were never in the conversation.

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