Knetwit

~ the obituary ~

Knetwit paid you for your lecture notes. You uploaded whatever you had from a class, somebody else downloaded it, and every view earned you one unit of a currency the site called Koin. Koin bought things in the Knetwit store, where the stock ran to speakers and shirts and iPods and televisions, or it converted into real money through PayPal.

Two Babson College students built it. Benjamin Wald and Dean Jenks were fraternity brothers who both left school to work on the idea, started the company in Michigan in 2007 with six employees, and moved it to Chattanooga, Tennessee in January 2008. They brought in Thomas Bohn, then forty six, as chief executive. By that August the payroll was seventeen full-time staff plus three interns, and by September it was twenty two.

The product came out of beta on 16 September 2008, which is roughly when the press turned up. BusinessWeek put Wald among its finalists for America's Best Young Entrepreneurs that month. Inside Higher Ed covered the site on 19 September under a headline about getting paid for sharing your notes, and reported backing of at least five million dollars in venture capital and other funds. Every version of that figure traces back to Wald himself.

~ the case file ~

~ what a koin was worth ~

You could describe the mechanics in a sentence, which was most of the appeal and all of the problem. One Koin per view of a file you had uploaded, and more Koin for inviting friends. Prizes came from Amazon, funded like the rest of the site out of advertising. There was no pre-screening of uploads whatsoever; the company's position was that users would report anything infringing, which is the position every user-upload business of that era held right up until somebody tested it.

What students were actually posting was a harder question than the model allowed room for. A set of lecture notes belongs to whoever wrote it, except that it is also a transcription of somebody else's teaching, and a scanned problem set is neither of those things. Knetwit never had to resolve any of it, because the site stopped before anyone made it.

~ down for maintenance ~

On 14 November 2009 the front page was still working and still selling the pitch: download free notes for your textbooks, create content and earn money. Logged-in links were in place and a recent activity feed was running down the page. Featured users had a few hundred to a few thousand notes against their names.

The next capture is dated 17 January 2010 and runs to 587 bytes. The whole of its visible text is "Knetwit is down for maintenance." It was still saying that in April. A parking-style redirect had surfaced on the address in between, that March, and the registration standing today was taken out by a stranger in November 2016.

Wikipedia puts the ending in March 2011, when the original registration lapsed, which is fourteen months after the site stopped serving anything at all. That gap is ordinary for this kind of ending, and the only honest date here is a bracket. The distance for me is short in time and total in place. I was finishing university in Turkey while Knetwit ran, on a campus where notes moved by photocopy and by MSN file transfer, and a site issuing its own currency against them would have read as an American idea. It was one, built in Michigan and run out of Tennessee.

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