K2Kapital

» see k2kapital.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1999 I was fifteen months into having the internet at home, on a modem that topped out at 33.6k, and the cost of a connection was counted in minutes. A live wire of world financial markets was close to the least dial-up-friendly product the web could have offered anyone in Turkey that year. K2Kapital launched in Russia anyway, in Russian, and became one of the oldest continuously running sources of global-markets information in the language.

Its self-description was a mouthful and an honest one: an information and analytical portal. It monitored world events under expert commentary, and it published interviews and reporting from its own correspondents in several countries. Its readers were the people who need the previous night's numbers before the Moscow market opens, plus the journalists who write about them. Its newsmakers list ran from Russian and foreign economists to State Duma deputies and members of the Academy of Sciences, which for a finance wire is the part that gets you cited.

It was cited, too. Outlets across Russia and its neighbors ran its material. In January 2009 Yandex's catalog ranked it 16th out of 321 registered news agencies, which puts it well inside the top five percent of a crowded category. That same year it took out formal registration as an information agency and periodical publication, certificate ФС77-36373, meaning it stopped being a website that wrote about finance and became a legally recognized press outlet. It had already collected a Leader of the National Economy award in 2007, and it was a co-founder of the Plyushchev Prize, the Runet award for best new services and startups.

~ the record ~

~ the company behind it ~

The site is seven years older than the company that ended up owning it. OOO K2Kapital was registered in Moscow on 28 October 2005, at ulitsa Aleksandra Lukyanova 3, with a charter capital of 2,425,300 rubles and two founders, one of them a foreign legal entity. Sergey Vladimirovich Stolyarov was appointed general director on 31 March 2009, which is the same year the press registration came through.

The registered activity codes are the most revealing document it left. Its primary code was business and management consulting. Fourteen activities were listed in total, including financial market management, information agency services, advertising, market research and translation. A media business that files itself primarily as a consultancy is telling you where it expected the money to come from, and it was not from readers.

~ the day nobody announced ~

There is no shutdown post. There is no farewell page. What exists is one line in the state register dated 3 October 2016 that reads, in the formula the Russian tax service uses, exclusion from the register of an inactive legal entity. That process only starts after a company has filed nothing and moved no money through its accounts for twelve straight months, so the real end of the work predates the paperwork by at least a year and probably more.

Business publications tend to end this way. The readers were never the paying customer, so there is nobody to write a farewell letter to, and the first outside party who notices is the tax office. Seventeen years of daily coverage of the world's markets, and the only dated event anyone recorded at the end of it is a registry entry.

~ what sits there now ~

k2kapital.com still resolves. What it returns is four lines of HTML whose only content is a script that sends your browser to a path called /lander, the standard furniture of a domain-parking service waiting for somebody to make an offer. The archived certificate list that proves it was a registered agency is easier to find today than anything it ever published.

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