İzlesene.com

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

~ the obit ~

İzlesene had its Turkish moment between 2008 and 2010, and the reason is not especially flattering to the product. On 5 May 2008 a court blocked YouTube across Turkey and the block stayed on for two and a half years. Everyone who wanted to watch a wedding clip or a goal or a television sketch had to find somewhere else to put it, and İzlesene was the somewhere else that already existed.

It had opened two years before that. Sidar Şahin and Şenel Şahin built it in 2006 as the first Turkish video sharing site and sold it to Nokta İnternet Teknolojileri in 2007, the same year it won the Altın Örümcek award for content sharing. The product was a straight reading of YouTube with Turkish menus and a Turkish moderation queue, which in 2006 was enough of a difference to matter.

By 2011 it sat at 104th on the list of most visited sites in Turkey, pulling around 633,000 unique visitors a day against roughly 1,700 new uploads. Nokta's network as a whole reached 81.1 percent of Turkish internet users in a month according to comScore that February, and Intel Capital chose that company for its first investment in Turkey the following month.

I was here on a TTNet line for all of it, and the ban years are the part I actually remember. Not the site so much as the economy of workarounds around it. Everyone had a proxy address written down somewhere, and the people who could not be bothered with proxies watched whatever had been reuploaded to İzlesene. That is a real memory of the period and it is also the entire product. It was where Turkish video went when the big one was unreachable.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the ban years ~

The YouTube block ran from 5 May 2008 to 30 October 2010, which is roughly thirty months of a national audience with nowhere obvious to go. İzlesene took a large share of it and so did Vidivodo. Both then learned what the other side of the same legal machinery felt like. On 23 March 2011 a protection order from an Istanbul court, dated a month earlier, was applied to both sites and they went dark in the afternoon. İzlesene came back the same evening and was blocked again at noon the next day.

When YouTube returned in October 2010 the traffic did not split between them. It went home. Nothing İzlesene did after that changed the shape of the curve, because the thing that had built the audience was never the site.

~ the slow fade ~

The Alexa numbers carry the next decade on their own: 104th in Turkey in 2011, 1,645th by November 2021. The site kept running the whole time. It kept a trending row, a Top 100, a category list down the side, and an audience that got smaller every year without ever quite reaching zero.

The Internet Archive dates the end to the day. On 2 March 2025 izlesene.com was still serving a full homepage of around 14 KB with trending clips on it. On 3 March the same address returned 548 bytes, and it has returned about 548 bytes every day since. There was no announcement and no news story on the day. Nokta Medya was left holding sinemalar.com and doviz.com.

~ what replaced it ~

The founders did considerably better than the site did. Sidar Şahin left after the sale and built GameGarden, which went to Doğan Holding. He was among the people who put Trendyol together in 2010. Then came Peak Games, which Zynga bought in 2020 for 1.8 billion dollars, and which made him the founder of Turkey's first unicorn. The line runs back to a YouTube clone written in 2006.

İzlesene itself left no successor, because after 2010 it no longer had a job. What it demonstrates is narrower and more useful than a product lesson. A national video site can win an enormous audience purely because the international one is unreachable, and it will hand every bit of that audience back on the day the block comes off.

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