Look At Me

» see lookatme.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Russian-language web is one of the largest on the internet and, from Turkey, one of the least visible. We are close enough to share a sea and far enough apart in script that nothing crosses without somebody deciding to translate it. For ten years there was a Moscow publication doing the thing that every city's young culture magazine was doing in that decade, and i could not have named it.

Look At Me began in 2006 as a street-style blog. Somebody photographing what people were wearing on Moscow streets and putting it online, which was the exact shape a hundred sites had in that year. Five people started it. Two of them were journalists, Vasily Esmanov and Alexey Ametov. The rest came out of marketing and design.

It grew out of clothes fast. By the early 2010s it was covering culture and technology for readers under thirty and was routinely described as the central publication of Russian hipster life, which is a label nobody chooses for themselves and nobody escapes either.

~ the dossier ~

~ the holding ~

The interesting structural fact is that Look At Me kept giving pieces of itself away. The Village, a city guide, started as a section inside it. So did Furfur and later Wonderzine. Each one grew big enough to be spun out as its own publication under the Look At Media banner, and each one took an audience with it.

That is a healthy way for a publisher to grow and a bad way for a flagship to stay a flagship. By 2015 the parent title was surrounded by its own children, all of them narrower and better defined than it was. A general culture site is hardest to justify when every specific thing it used to cover now has its own address.

~ what stopped it ~

The money was not comfortable. In April 2015 the Federal Tax Service filed a bankruptcy claim against Look At Media, which is the kind of thing that concentrates a publisher's mind about which titles are carrying their weight.

The reason given in public was editorial rather than financial. Ametov said the agenda Look At Me had been running had become less relevant to contemporary Russia, and that the brand would begin a new life at some other historical moment. It is a careful sentence and it was 2015 in Moscow, so it was probably as much as anyone was going to say out loud. The staff moved across to the sister titles, and the site stopped updating on 1 January 2016.

~ the long tail ~

Nothing was taken down. Ten years of articles are still served at the original address in 2026, from a server somebody is still paying for, with no notice on the front page explaining that the last piece went up a decade ago. Publications usually die by having their archive folded into a parent domain or dropped entirely.

This one was simply put down mid-stride and left where it fell, which makes it readable in a way that a redesigned archive never is. You can still see what a Moscow twenty-five-year-old was supposed to care about in 2013. The decision to freeze rather than delete is the only part of this story that was fully in the publisher's hands, and they got it right.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »