Ikbis

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

~ the obituary ~

Ikbis published in Arabic. That is the whole of my distance from it and it is a real one, because I can put the interface through a translator and I cannot read the comments at all, which on a video site is most of what was actually there. What I can do is read the shape of it, and the shape is a regional YouTube that arrived early and lasted longer than most of its class.

TootCorp launched it in November 2006 out of Amman. The company had been put together in late 2005 by a group including Ahmad Humeid, a graphic designer in the city, around the idea that Arabic-language self-publishing was about to matter, and it ran an Arabic blog aggregator called Toot alongside the video site. Ikbis means press, or click. It took photo and video uploads at a point when almost nothing on the web spoke Arabic natively, and Newsweek wrote it up as a YouTube being born for the Arab world.

It got to roughly 30,000 page views a day early on. A redesign landed in August 2008, new features were still shipping into 2009, and the site stayed up for another seven years after that. For a regional video site running against YouTube on Jordanian money, a decade is a long run.

~ the case file ~

~ the arab youtube ~

The comparison was fair for about two years and then it stopped being fair, which is what happened to every national YouTube built between 2006 and 2008. YouTube added Arabic and localized domains, and once it had those the reason to upload somewhere smaller evaporated, because the audience had already gone to the place with everything on it.

What Ikbis held onto instead was a curated middle: the last working homepage is organized into hand-built collections with titles like old television commercials and Moroccan recipes. That is an editor's page, not an algorithm's, and it is why the site reads as a magazine with video in it rather than as a feed.

~ bad gateway ~

The Internet Archive holds a monthly crawl of ikbis.com going back to 2007 and the file sizes tell the story without any reporting attached. Nine kilobytes of homepage every month through 2015 and 2016, steady, unremarkable. The last of those is 18 October 2016 at 9,147 bytes.

Then the crawler comes back on 18 May 2017 and gets a 502 Bad Gateway, 432 bytes. It gets the same thing in June and again in July, and after that there is a gap of nearly three years. By September 2020 the domain is answering with two kilobytes of parking page, and today it is a lander trying to sell the name. A 502 is what a site returns when the machine in front is still running and the machine behind it is not, which is the precise technical signature of a service that was left rather than closed.

~ what the last page said ~

The footer of that final working capture carries a copyright line reading Toot 2011. The site was still serving uploads in October 2016 with a copyright notice five years stale, which is a small thing and tells you most of what you need about the last stretch. The tagline across the top still read as it had for years: a new Arab community that films and makes whatever it wants.

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