Kudzu.com

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

~ the obit ~

Kudzu.com launched in June 2005 out of Cox Enterprises in Atlanta, which is a newspaper and cable company, and the name came from the vine that grows over whole hillsides across the American South once it gets a start. The site was a directory of local businesses with ratings and written reviews layered on top, weighted toward the trades: the roofers and electricians you call when something in the house stops working.

The business underneath it was much older than the web. A local paper has always made its money standing between a homeowner who needs a plumber and a plumber who needs customers, and Cox owned the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kudzu was that arrangement rebuilt as a website, with reviews doing the work the classified ad used to do.

A directory of Georgia contractors had no route to Ankara and was never going to. What is legible from here is the model rather than the product, because every country had a version of it: a newspaper sitting on a monopoly in local advertising, watching that monopoly move online without it.

It worked regionally, so Cox pushed it out of Georgia in the fall of 2006 and took it national a year after that, offering listings in every American market. That was the high point, and it did not hold for long.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Kudzu shipped a year after Yelp and aimed somewhere else entirely. Yelp wanted restaurants and nightlife in dense cities where people walk out their door and pick somewhere. Kudzu wanted home services in a metro area where people drive, which is a market with far fewer reviews per business and a much higher value per lead.

That made the economics look good on paper and made the cold start brutal in practice. A restaurant collects reviews because people eat out weekly. A homeowner replaces a roof twice in a lifetime.

~ the retreat ~

Going national in 2007 meant listing businesses everywhere and having reviews for almost none of them. Yelp had the head start and a culture of people who wrote reviews for the sake of writing them. Google started putting business listings with star ratings directly into the search results, which no standalone directory could out-position, since the competitor was the page the customer was already on. Kudzu ended up back under Cox Media Group, filed in with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, serving the city it had started in.

~ the day it died ~

The notice went out in the autumn of 2018 and the local SEO blogs picked it up before anyone else did, telling contractors to copy their testimonials off the site before the deadline. Cox Media Group said it had decided, after careful consideration, to shut the Kudzu.com directory down. The date was 30 November 2018, and the sign-off thanked people for thirteen years of support.

kudzu.com does not answer at all now. There is no parking page and no redirect to a Cox property, just a connection that times out.

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