İxir

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

~ the last words ~

The oldest thing the archive holds for this brand is one line of Turkish, captured on 27 November 1999: bu site yapım aşamasındadır, lütfen daha sonra tekrar deneyiniz. This site is being built, please try again later. Doğuş Holding was about to spend an amount of money on İxir that people in Turkish media still quote from memory, and the first surviving artifact is a placeholder.

The company behind it was set up in 1998 and the brand went to work in 1999, selling dial-up access to Turkish households at a moment when almost nobody in the country had a reason to know what an ISP was. Doğuş hired Babür Özden away from Superonline to run it, put Garanti Bankası on the shareholder list and built a portal on top of the access business, because in 1999 every ISP anywhere believed the portal was where the money would eventually be. Ferit Şahenk took the chair of the board when Özden left the general manager's job to Cenk Serdar.

By late 2001 the access business was priced against Türk Telekom, which owned the lines, and the portal was priced against a Turkish online advertising market that did not yet exist in any real sense. Then the February 2001 financial crisis took the purchasing power of the subscriber base with it. On 5 December 2001 Serdar and Superonline's Savaş Ünsal held a joint press conference to announce that Doğuş was leaving consumer internet and that İxir's roughly 100,000 subscribers were moving to Superonline over the following two months, keeping their email addresses.

My own dial-up years sit exactly on top of this. I had been online since 1998, and Superonline is one of the names on my own short list of Turkish ISPs from that stretch. So the company that absorbed İxir is a company I was already dialing, which is a strange way to be next to a failure. Nothing about my connection changed in December 2001. Behind it, a brand that had bought half the advertising breaks in the country stopped existing, and the only visible consequence for anyone was a different login server.

~ the record ~

~ the commercials ~

The campaign is the part Turkey remembers, and it is worth being precise about why it worked. The films were written by Ali Taran, who was the most-copied ad man in the country at the time, and they did not try to explain networking to anyone. They put ordinary street trades on screen, a chestnut seller and a roasted-chickpea seller, next to Banu Alkan, who was a household name for reasons that had nothing to do with computers. The pitch was that this was for you too, not for engineers.

It worked in the sense that people learned the name. It did not work in the sense that mattered, because a dial-up subscriber in Turkey in 2000 was worth a few dollars a month and a national television campaign is not priced in a few dollars a month. This is the whole 1999 portal thesis in one company: buy attention now, monetize the audience later, on a curve that assumed advertisers were coming.

~ the handover ~

Ünsal said one thing at that press conference that has aged better than anything else either company put out. There is a reality in Turkey called Türk Telekom, he said, and the state holds all of the resources, so competing with the state is hard. Our aim is not to become a monopoly, it is to stay standing. He was describing a market where every private ISP rented its access from the incumbent it was supposedly competing with.

He also promised, almost in passing, that the İxir homepage would shortly become the Superonline homepage. Nobody at the time would have written that down as the interesting sentence.

~ two years later ~

He meant it literally. By March 2003 the address printed on all that television, ixir.com, was serving Superonline's front page, weather for three cities down one side and Iraq war headlines down the other. The brand had no page of its own anymore, just a domain pointing at the company that bought its customers. Today it points nowhere at all and has no DNS record.

The number stayed hidden for a decade and then came out sideways, in a 2012 interview where Ali Sabancı was asked whether he had ever lost his father's money. He said he sank 25 million dollars into Turk.net, and that he used to comfort himself in front of his parents by pointing out that Ferit had lost more, because Doğuş had put 72 million into İxir. We still talk about it, he added. That is how the price of Turkey's loudest dead ISP entered the record: two men who could afford it, joking.

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