ListBot

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

~ the obituary ~

The mailing list never really happened in Turkey, and that is a statement about the form rather than about ListBot. When I got online in 1998 the places where people gathered were IRC channels and, a few years later, web forums, and that is where the whole community layer of the Turkish internet went on to live. The idea that a group of people would organize itself around an email address that copied every message to everybody was an anglo-internet habit that arrived here late and thinly, if at all.

ListBot was built by Submit It! Inc., a private company in Bedford, Massachusetts, and no source I could find records when it first went up. The earliest date anybody fixes to it is June 1998, when LinkExchange bought Submit It! and took the service with it. That November, Microsoft bought LinkExchange, and a free tool for hobbyists with personal web pages became the property of the largest software company on earth.

The product itself was simple and that was the point. You put a form on your site and visitors typed an email address into it. ListBot handled the list itself along with the unsubscribe link, and kept a web archive of everything that had been sent. Anybody with a page about their band or their aquarium could run an announcement list without a server or a sysadmin, which in 1999 was not a small thing to be given for free.

~ the case file ~

~ the numbers ~

The growth was real and Microsoft advertised it. On 17 May 1999 the company put out a release announcing that ListBot had passed ten million subscribers. By January 2000 the figure was over twenty million subscribers across more than half a million individuals and businesses running lists.

Then the numbers get strange. When The Register covered the shutdown in June 2001, it described ListBot as having around 100,000 customers, roughly a tenth of whom paid for an enhanced tier. That is a fifth of the January 2000 figure eighteen months later. Either the service lost most of its list owners in that window or the two sources are counting different things, and I have not found anything that settles it. Both numbers are left here as they were published.

~ the day it died ~

Microsoft emailed users in June 2001. All ListBot email functionality was disabled on 6 August, and for the following two weeks you could log in only to download your subscriber list and copy out your archived messages. On 20 August 2001 the service was switched off completely.

The stated reasoning was that ListBot was a consumer service for hobbyists and personal site owners, which is true and was also the entire reason it had twenty million subscribers on it. What Microsoft offered instead was List Builder, launched on bCentral that February at $149 a year, aimed squarely at small businesses. The people being moved were not small businesses. They were somebody with a page about their band, and the price of the thing they had been using went from nothing to $149 in a single email.

That trade is the reason this grave is worth keeping. It is one of the earliest clean examples of a free consumer service being acquired and then converted into a paid business product, with the original users treated as an unfortunate side effect rather than as the asset. Everyone who has since watched a tool they relied on get bought and repriced has seen this exact sequence run again.

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