INteRNeTTo

» see internetto.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

INteRNeTTo went up in 1995, which in Hungary made it the first thing that resembled a news portal. The name is a pun. Internet plus tó, the Hungarian word for lake, settled on by András Nyírő at a lakeside.

It grew out of a CD-ROM project called ABCD that had been running since 1992, and IDG Hungary paid the bills. By 1996 it was running daily news alongside reader forums under the heading Az olvasó ír, with regional editions covering Hungary and Slovakia. By 1998 it was not competing with anything, because in Hungary there was nothing of the kind to compete with.

This one I can only read in translation, and the reason it never traveled is the same reason it counted at home. A Hungarian-language news site in 1996 was addressing a readership of about ten million people and nobody else, which is a fine business and a hopeless export.

~ the record ~

~ the walkout ~

By 1999 the editorial staff and IDG had stopped agreeing about what the site should turn into. The staff offered to buy it outright, fifteen million forints, and IDG turned them down. In April 1999 the entire editorial team resigned.

They left and started Index.hu, which became and remains the biggest news site in Hungary. That is the part of the story that gets retold, because the shape of it is clean: the people were the asset, and the owner found that out by losing them.

~ the funny part ~

INteRNeTTo did not stop in 1999. It kept publishing for nearly three more years with a rebuilt staff, working next door to the site its own predecessors had gone off to found, on the same beat, in the same language, for the same ten million readers. It was never going to win that, and by the end it was running at a fraction of its old weight.

~ the archive ~

In March 2002 Index.hu and EuroWeb signed an agreement handing the display rights for the INteRNeTTo online magazine to Index. The notice went up on the front page dated 27 March. The Wayback Machine has a working daily front page from 24 January 2002 and the handover notice two months after it, so the live site stopped somewhere in that gap.

Index left the archive standing rather than posting a shutdown page over it. The front page turned into a short list of old pieces with their original dates still attached: the 1998 NATO referendum coverage, and a banking and stock market column dated 9 November 1995.

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