Handbag.com

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

~ the goodbye ~

Handbag.com had no reason to reach turkey, and it did not. Every part of it was local, down to a launch campaign that ran across shop counters rather than across the internet. What i can picture from here is the mechanics of that. In late 1999 Boots gave away three million discs through its stores to get people onto a website, which tells you exactly how much of britain was not yet online and how you were expected to fix it.

The site went live on 6 october 1999 as a joint venture between The Boots Company and Hollinger Telegraph New Media, the digital arm of the Telegraph's owner. It sold itself as a one stop portal for women, with shopping on one side and health advice on the other, and a free email address attached. Its managing director Dominic Riley called it the world's first internet page aimed purely at women, which was not quite true and did not need to be. Nobody else in britain was making the claim that year.

By rights it should have died in 2001 with the rest of them. The women's portal was a standard dot-com pitch and most of the companies making it went down inside eighteen months, taking the venture money with them. Handbag.com did not. It was still there in 2006, drawing a real audience against real ad rates, and it got bought.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

On 9 october 2006 the National Magazine Company, Hearst's british arm, bought the handbag group from Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay for a reported twenty-two million pounds. Four sites came with it: handbag.com, allaboutyou.com, getlippy.com and a pregnancy site called gomamatoday.com. By may 2007 the ABCe audit put handbag.com past 1.4 million unique users a month, which made it one of the larger women's sites in britain and most of the reason the price was what it was.

Nat Mags merged with Hachette Filipacchi UK in 2011 to form Hearst Magazines UK, and handbag.com found itself in a portfolio that had Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping in it. A 1999 dot-com had turned into a line item on a magazine publisher's digital roster. That is a survival, and it is also where the ending starts, because a line item is a thing that can be removed without anybody writing a press release about it.

~ the long tail ~

There is no shutdown announcement for handbag.com. No closure post, no farewell page, no trade story. What there is instead is a gap in the archive. The site was serving normally on 31 march 2015, with Hearst's own analytics loading on the homepage and its ad slots still filling, and after that date there is nothing but redirects. The domain now lands on Harper's Bazaar UK.

So the date on this grave comes off the Wayback Machine rather than out of a filing, and it is a month rather than a day, and it is worth saying so plainly instead of pretending otherwise. This is the ordinary way a website of that size dies now. Somebody in a meeting decides the traffic is worth more pointed somewhere else, a redirect goes in, and fifteen years of a british women's internet becomes a 301.

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