Jeuxvideo.fr

» see jeuxvideo.fr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

French-language gaming coverage was never going to reach me in Ankara. I read English sites and Turkish forums, and the French web of that era is a place I know about from other people's graves rather than my own history. What makes this one worth writing anyway is the shape of the death, which has nothing to do with language.

Jeuxvideo.fr launched in 2000 out of Flashback Multimédia, a small operation run by Richard Richarté with a programmer and an editor beside him. The problem arrived immediately and was written into the address. Jeuxvideo.com already existed, already had the audience, and its owners went to court over how similar the two domains looked.

The site stopped. It came back around 2002 and carried on for another thirteen years under that permanent handicap: everyone who typed the name into a browser had to remember which suffix they wanted, and most of them did not.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

It grew anyway, slowly, on the ordinary work of games coverage. About 150,000 visitors a month by the end of 2003, around 450,000 by January 2005, then a relaunch that October. The number that gives the site its real weight comes two years later: 6.67 million visitors and 28 million page views across 2007.

Cyréalis bought Flashback Multimédia in September 2005 and the site went up the corporate chain from there, ending inside M6 Web, the digital arm of a national television broadcaster. That is a normal French media outcome and it is usually the point where a site stops being anybody's project and starts being a line item.

~ the name fight ~

The domain dispute deserves its own paragraph because it explains everything else. In 2000 a good address was most of a media business. Jeuxvideo.com had the obvious one, and jeuxvideo.fr had a name that was legally distinct and practically identical, which is the worst combination available.

It meant the site could never win the traffic it was building for. Every search and every half-remembered link went to the competitor by default. The site spent two decades doing the same work as its rival and collecting a fraction of the reward, which is a slow way to lose and a hard one to explain to an owner reading a spreadsheet.

~ the second death ~

M6 Web closed it on 19 May 2015. That should have been the end, and for six years it was. Then Clubic SAS, which had taken formal control of the property in March 2018, brought the address back on 30 June 2021 as JVFR, a beta relaunch with a new team and the old name shortened.

It lasted twelve months. The farewell post went up on 9 June 2022 under the headline "c'est (re)fini", and the reason given was plain: the audience and the advertising were not enough to carry the site without damaging Clubic itself. A publisher had looked at a dead brand, decided there was still something in it, and found out there was not.

~ the long tail ~

The rival is still there. Jeuxvideo.com remains one of the largest games sites in Europe and has outlived the thing that spent twenty two years being confused with it, which is the ordinary fate of the second-best domain in any market.

What jeuxvideo.fr actually leaves is a warning about how much of a media business used to live in the address bar. The writing was competent and the audience was real, and neither was ever enough to overcome one suffix of difference in a URL. Search engines and social feeds eventually made domains matter less, but that arrived about fifteen years too late to help this one.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »