Kataweb

» see kataweb.it as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In 1999 an Italian newspaper would mail you a CD and the internet was free. Not the phone call, which you still paid for by the minute, but the account itself, which cost nothing. That model swept across Europe for about three years and it never reached me. I was on Superonline and then TTNet, paying for the subscription and paying for the line, and a publisher handing out dial-up accounts to build an audience was not a thing the Turkish market tried.

Kataweb went live in May 1999. Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso built it after Repubblica.it turned out more popular than anyone at the paper had expected, and Paolo Dal Pino ran it. The journalists on the original editorial project included Vittorio Zambardino and Ernesto Assante, which tells you the operation was staffed like a newsroom rather than like a website. The slogan was il sapore di internet, the taste of the internet.

It did what an Italian portal in 1999 did. Free dial-up access on a mini CD and an email service called Katamail. News channels aggregated whatever the group's papers had published that day. Later there were blogs, thousands of them, sitting on kataweb.it subdomains and left running for the best part of two decades.

~ the record ~

~ the number ~

At the founding, UniCredit bought five percent of Kataweb for 305 billion lire. The bank's own valuation of the whole company was 6,000 billion lire, which is somewhere close to three billion euros, for an Italian newspaper's website in its first year of operation.

The shareholders planned a stock market listing and it never happened. The window shut between 1998 and 2001 while a set of Italian entrepreneurs were pouring money into the same sector, and by the time Kataweb would have listed there was no appetite left for the story. That is the ordinary version of the dot-com ending. Not a bankruptcy, just a valuation that quietly stops being mentioned.

~ the long tail ~

The interesting thing about Kataweb is how long it went on being useful after it stopped being important. The dial-up business went away with dial-up. Katamail kept running until 2015, when it was handed over to Tiscali, which is the standard move for an email service that has turned into a support cost. The portal itself became a container for the group's other properties, a TV guide called TvZap and a self-publishing service called ilmiolibro.

And the blogs stayed. Writers had been posting on kataweb.it subdomains since the middle of the 2000s, some of them for fifteen or seventeen years without a break, on infrastructure nobody at the company was thinking about any more.

~ the day it died ~

GEDI, which by then owned the group, decided to close the portal. The bloggers were told in December 2021 that from the middle of January 2022 this space would no longer exist. Massimo Maugeri, who had been running a literary blog there since 2006, wrote a farewell post on 8 December and compared it to losing the building you grew up in, then said the sensible thing, which was that he was moving the archive elsewhere and carrying on.

That is the whole obituary. No press release, no closing statement, no figure attached to any of it. A company once priced at three billion euros ended as a hosting bill somebody decided not to pay, and the people who noticed were the ones with fifteen years of posts sitting on it.

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