Luxist

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

~ the obituary ~

Weblogs, Inc. ran about ninety blogs and exactly one of them traveled. Engadget was on the reading list of every person who cared about hardware, anywhere with a connection, and the rest of the network stayed a domestic American product. Luxist was one of the rest. It launched on 5 October 2004, and the first post was a 118-foot Wallypower megayacht, which tells you the beat without further explanation.

The beat was luxury goods reported as news: watches and private jets, real estate with a helipad on it. Deidre Woollard wrote most of it and kept writing it for close to seven years. AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. in October 2005 for roughly $25 million, and for a while Luxist was a legitimate AOL property with staff and a budget behind it.

Then AOL bought The Huffington Post in February 2011 for $315 million and put Arianna Huffington in charge of content. The reorganization that followed cut more than 200 jobs and consolidated something like thirty brands. Luxist did not get a wind-down plan. It got a destination: StyleList, AOL's fashion site, which had no obvious interest in yachts.

~ the case file ~

~ the blog network ~

Weblogs, Inc. was Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey's bet that a blog could be a beat and a beat could be a business. The model was one or two writers per vertical, paid per post, publishing on a shared platform called Blogsmith, with ad inventory sold centrally. It worked well enough that AOL paid eight figures for it, and the same structure is why the whole network dies the same way in the archive, with identical URL schemes and identical last posts.

The verticals that survived were the ones with an obvious advertiser attached. Autoblog had car makers. Engadget had every consumer electronics company on earth. Luxist had brands that mostly do not buy display advertising, because the people they sell to are not reachable through banner impressions.

~ the day it died ~

The last post went up on 31 May 2011 at 10:00AM, titled "Luxist has a new home!" The body was one sentence and a link to StyleList. That was the whole obituary AOL wrote for a site with seven years of archive under it.

The comment thread underneath ran for months and none of it was polite. One reader wrote that they had been reading for four solid years with colleagues and could not see StyleList caring about watches or mansions. Another said they were deleting the feed from their Google homepage. The best record of what Luxist was is the complaint thread on the notice that killed it.

~ what got buried with it ~

Deidre Woollard later wrote about the shutdown under the title "AOL Destroyed Seven Years Of My Life With One Click," which is a fair description of what a folded blog feels like from the inside when the archive stops being addressable.

The address itself outlived the writing by a long stretch. Something kept answering at luxist.com year after year, through crawls a decade past the last post, and it only stopped this year. A domain that keeps returning a page is not the same thing as a site that is still alive, and Luxist spent fifteen years demonstrating the difference.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »