Holy Soap

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

~ the obit ~

Five had taken Neighbours off the BBC in 2008, which left a British commercial channel holding two Australian soap operas and an audience that watched them on weekday afternoons. On 25 June 2009 it gave them a website of their own. Holy Soap carried full episodes of Neighbours and Home and Away on the day they were broadcast and kept them up for another month. Around the player sat cast pages and character guides.

The strange decision was the editorial one. Holy Soap also covered soaps that were not on Five at all, running news about EastEnders and Coronation Street for readers who would then go and watch them on another channel. Five's head of digital media, Jonathan Lewis, explained it at the launch: "We're not precious. We know that soap fans have voracious appetites and that many of the same people who love Neighbours and Home & Away love the soaps on the other channels too." It worked: somewhere between a quarter and a third of the site's traffic went to programming the broadcaster did not own. By December 2009 it sat in the fastest growing group of websites run by any major UK broadcaster.

Then the channel changed hands. Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell bought Five in July 2010 and the name reverted to Channel 5 in early 2011. A separate domain running a separate soap magazine is the sort of line item a new owner questions in week one. On 30 June 2011 Holy Soap announced it was closing that day. Neighbours and Home and Away moved to channel5.com, and the brand that had been built to hold them lasted two years and five days.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ a slot i did not have ~

Turkey had no equivalent of this site, because the afternoon slot here was never given to imported serials. Turkish series ran long, sometimes two hours with the advertising, and they occupied the evening rather than the dead time after school. Neighbours and Home and Away are shows I have only ever met as references in British writing. Holy Soap was built around a daily four-thirty habit that nobody I knew had.

~ the day it told you ~

Most websites that close give you a few weeks of warning and a sentimental paragraph to read on the way out. Holy Soap posted its notice and shut on the same date, with the episodes pointed at channel5.com from that morning onwards.

The soaps were fine. Neighbours ran on Channel 5 until 2022 and Home and Away stayed on the channel for years after that, so the content outlived its container by more than a decade. What went was the idea that a broadcaster needed a destination site per genre, a theory that most of British television tried in those years and most of it abandoned inside three.

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