Guba

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

~ the last words ~

guba started as an archive, not a video site. the name was an acronym, gigantic usenet binaries archive, and in 1998 that is exactly what it was: a way to search the files people posted into usenet newsgroups and pull them down through a browser instead of a proper news client.

thomas mcinerney built it with eric lambrecht in san francisco. mcinerney had been an engineer at apple before this. the business was simple and, for a while, quietly profitable. tens of thousands of people paid around fifteen dollars a month to search usenet for video and images without touching a newsreader. by 2006 guba wanted to be respectable, signed deals with warner bros and sony to sell real movie downloads, and tried to stand next to itunes as a paid video store.

usenet binaries were a world i knew about but never lived in. in the internet cafe years, 2002 to 2005, my downloading was mp3s over whatever the cafe connection gave me, not a paid subscription to a us usenet indexer that billed a credit card i did not have. guba was an american service for people who paid for their movies or their piracy, and neither habit was mine.

~ the record ~

~ the pivot that did not take ~

guba spent its second half trying to leave usenet behind. mcinerney left as ceo in december 2006 and lambrecht took over. the plan was licensed movies and a clean video store the studios could trust. but youtube had already made video free and social, and a fifteen-dollar-a-month usenet archive that read like a paid version of something google gave away for nothing had no answer to that. the site faded out by 2009 and the domain drifted off into junk.

~ what it got right early ~

for a couple of years guba really was the google of usenet, a search box over a medium that had none. it saw before most people did that you might want rich media out of the newsgroups without learning how newsgroups worked. that instinct was correct. the part it got wrong was thinking anyone would keep paying for it once the free web caught up.

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