LineOne

» see lineone.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

lineone was uk-only at the newsagent layer. its launch mechanism in 1997 was setup software given away inside the sunday times, on the weekend that paper published its rich list. that is a distribution strategy which only works in a country with national sunday newspapers big enough to hand several million households a modem dialer on the same morning.

the owners were bt on one side and two newspaper groups on the other, news international and united news and media. it looks like a strange combination now and made complete sense then. the phone company had the network and no idea what content was for. the publishers had content and were watching classified advertising start to look fragile. the deal was that lineone would be a portal as well as an isp, so the newspapers had somewhere to put themselves.

it worked at the top of the funnel and nowhere else. lineone reached 1.85 million registered subscribers and became the fifth largest isp in the uk, but only around 800,000 of those accounts were in use by the time anyone counted properly. free registration handed out with a newspaper produces exactly that: a very large number, with a much smaller reality sitting underneath it.

i got online in turkey in 1998 by signing up with an isp and paying it every month, which was the ordinary way to do this in most places. britain had a few years where getting connected was something that happened to you because you bought a paper or walked past the right shelf in a supermarket. lineone and freeserve were both built on that, and both of them counted subscribers in a way that flattered the count.

~ the dossier ~

~ the giveaway ~

the sunday times promotion is worth sitting with, because it explains the shape of the whole company. a national paper puts your software in front of a few million households in one morning. you get an enormous registration spike, almost no acquisition cost, and a subscriber number you can carry into a boardroom. what you do not get is any information about whether those people wanted an internet connection or simply found a disc in the paper.

the rich list weekend was not an accident either. that issue outsells every other one in the year, which is the entire reason a launch got timed to it. news international owned the paper and owned part of the isp, so the promotion cost the venture nothing that was not already inside the family.

~ the auction ~

by 2000 bt and united news and media wanted out. the isp went up for sale with expectations somewhere between 300 and 350 million pounds, a reasonable number for 1.85 million subscribers in a world where subscribers were the metric everybody had agreed to use. then the market turned, and the metric turned with it.

tiscali bought lineone on 26 april 2001 for 62 million pounds. that is under a fifth of what the sellers had been asking a year earlier, for the same asset with the same customers on it. nothing about lineone had changed in the interval. what changed was that buyers stopped paying for registered users and started asking which of them were paying for anything.

~ the long tail ~

in october 2001 anyone typing lineone.net was sent to tiscali.co.uk and the brand was finished. tiscali turned into britain's own rollup, absorbing isps until it was one of the largest in the country, then sold the entire uk operation to talktalk in june 2009.

the email addresses outlived all of it. lineone.net kept accepting mail for well over a decade after the website stopped existing, sitting first inside tiscali and then inside talktalk, still delivering to people who had signed up because of a newspaper promotion in 1997. an isp brand dies at the website. it dies at the mail server about fifteen years later, if it ever gets around to it.

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