iFrance

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

~ the last words ~

Almost everyone who built a first web page built it somewhere free, a host that gave you a few megabytes and an address in exchange for a banner ad across the top. that world i knew well, on Geocities-class sites in english and their Turkish cousins, and it is where a lot of us learned what a webpage even was. iFrance was the same idea spoken in French, and it was enormous, and i never once typed the URL.

so this is the outside view. iFrance started in 1996, founded by Marc Simoncini, who later built the dating giant Meetic, along with Thierry de Passemar. it did the free-host thing for the French web, handing out personal pages and an email address to anyone who wanted a corner of the internet of their own. at its height around 2008 it was carrying over three million pages and mailboxes, and tens of thousands of blogs on top. for the French-speaking web it was one of the front doors.

then the bubble happened to it. in May 2000, at the very peak of dot-com mania, Vivendi bought iFrance for forty-five million euros in cash plus a million of its own shares. it was exactly the kind of trophy the French media group's boss was buying with both hands right before the crash. when the internet bubble burst and Vivendi nearly came apart, iFrance turned from trophy to liability. in 2004 the group sold it off for a single symbolic euro.

after that it passed hand to hand between small owners who could not make free hosting pay, resold in 2005 and bought again in 2011. nobody really invested in it. the site simply stopped being updated at the end of 2009 and sat there frozen for years, old pages still loading, nothing new arriving. the servers were finally switched off in 2013 and the domains stopped answering that April. it did not so much shut down as get left to go cold.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

the funny part is the price tag. forty-five million euros to one euro in four years is the whole dot-com story compressed into a single asset. Vivendi paid a fortune for millions of free homepages at the moment everyone believed eyeballs were worth anything, and then could not give the thing away once the belief evaporated. the pages did not get less real. the market around them just stopped pretending they were money.

~ what got buried with it ~

what went cold with iFrance was a stretch of the French web that lived nowhere else, millions of personal pages of the amateur, hand-built kind, the ones a free host existed to carry. some of it survives in archives, most of it does not. the same thing happened in every language, Geocities in english and iFrance in French, the free hosts each country grew and then let die. the loss reads the same in every accent, a first draft of the personal web that its owners assumed would always be there.

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