Gurl.com

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

~ the last words ~

Gurl.com was built for American teenage girls and never pretended to be for anybody else. In May 1996 I was twelve years old in Turkey and two years away from my first modem, so this one is not distance I have to argue for. It is a site whose entire audience is documented and none of it is me.

It started as a master's thesis. Esther Drill, Rebecca Odes and Heather McDonald were graduate students at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and what they turned in was a web zine for girls that read nothing like the magazines then on the shelf. The subject matter was bodies and the specific misery of being fifteen, handled without the coaxing tone that teen magazines used, and illustrated in the flat hand-drawn style zine culture had brought with it onto the web.

The reach it got is hard to believe for something that started as coursework. Around 800,000 visitors a month by 1999, and by 2001 a figure that gets repeated because nobody has bettered it: roughly forty percent of American girls who used the internet regularly had been on Gurl.com. The founders turned the material into a book called Deal With It! in 1999, which sold well enough to make the site a going concern rather than a project.

What I can say from here is category-level and nothing more. Every national internet in that decade produced somewhere for teenagers to talk about the things adults would not discuss with them, and the ones I could have reached were forums rather than zines, in Turkish rather than English, with no editorial staff and no illustrations. The shape was the same and the object was not, so this obituary is reconstruction. I was not in the room and I do not know anybody who was.

~ the record ~

~ what a site for teenagers looked like in 1996 ~

The thing that dates Gurl.com most sharply is that it had a voice, singular, and that voice belonged to identifiable people who had made a choice about what they were doing. It was written the way a zine is written, by editors who answered letters. The message boards came later and the community grew large, but the site never became a feed, and there was never a moment where the material was being generated by an algorithm's guess at what would hold attention.

That model is what the next twenty years took apart. The advice column and the illustrated body diagram both survived into the era of teen media brands, but as content types, stripped of the specific people who had invented them and produced at volume by writers hired to produce volume. Gurl.com was still on the internet through all of it, and by the end it was one more URL in a portfolio, publishing quizzes.

~ passed from owner to owner ~

The ownership list reads like a survey of every failed model for making money off the web. The clothing retailer dELiA*s bought it in 1997 through its iTurf subsidiary and Primedia took it over in 2001. iVillage held it from 2003 for six years, then sold to Alloy, which renamed itself Defy Media in 2013 after merging with Break Media.

None of those companies bought a zine. Each of them bought an audience number, attached it to whatever the current theory was, and sold it on when the theory stopped working. The founders were long gone by the middle of that chain. The site kept its name for twenty two years and lost everything else it had at the start, one acquisition at a time.

~ the week the money stopped ~

Defy Media ended on 6 November 2018 without notice. Roughly 400 people were told that operations were ceasing effective immediately and the Beverly Hills production office closed that day, with creditors freezing the company's assets the day after. Everything it owned went dark at once. Smosh had already been sold off that June, but Clevver and the rest of the catalog simply stopped, Gurl.com among them.

It had not really been alive for a while. A former video editor put the last updates in 2017, so what died in November 2018 was a set of files still being served rather than a publication. The domain is still registered and still resolves, and it has been sending every visitor to Seventeen.com since Hearst took it. Twenty two years of a site built to be the alternative to teen magazines now redirects to a teen magazine.

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