Mindspark Interactive Network

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

~ the obituary ~

Nobody installed Mindspark's software on purpose. That is not an insult aimed at the people who ended up with it. It is a description of how the business worked, and the company built a twenty-two year run on it.

For most of the 2000s, the job of fixing the family computer went to whoever in the house had studied computer engineering. In mine that was me. You would sit down at a machine that had been fine three weeks earlier, open Internet Explorer, and find a strip of buttons across the top that nobody could account for. Under that strip, a second one. The home page had been changed to something called MyWebSearch, and every query typed into the address bar went there first. Somebody in the house had wanted animated cursors, or a smiley face to paste into MSN, and the price of that was the bar.

The company on the other end of it was not a basement operation. It was a wholly owned business unit of IAC with a head office in Yonkers and satellites in Bellevue and Oakland, run by executives whose names were on the website. Its former chief executive, Joey Levin, runs IAC today. Whatever you want to call the software, it was made by people with business cards.

~ the case file ~

~ six names ~

The entity was incorporated in 1999 as CTC Bulldog, Inc. The idea for its first product was written down on 20 January 1999 and launched that October as iWon.com, at which point the company renamed itself after it. In November 2001 it bought the wreckage of Excite out of bankruptcy and became The Excite Network. In 2002 it launched MyWay.com along with SmileyCentral and PopularScreensavers, and renamed itself Focus Interactive. In 2003 it became Interactive Search Holdings, which is the name Ask Jeeves paid $501 million for in 2004. IAC bought Ask Jeeves on 20 July 2005 and the unit became IAC Consumer Applications and Portals. On 1 January 2009 it was renamed one last time, to Mindspark.

Six names in ten years, and the product line ran straight through all of them without a break. By December 2003 its properties were reaching seventeen percent of American internet users and it was the ninth most visited property on the web. That number was not built on anything anyone would name as a favorite website. It was built on distribution.

~ the product wall ~

Mindspark's own front page in 2013 laid the catalog out as a grid of tiles: CursorMania, MyFunCards, MyScrapNook, MyWebFace, PopularScreensavers, RetroGamer, MyOwnSuperhero, OurBaby, GamingWonderland, Guffins, Webfetti for decorating a social profile, and Zwinky, the avatar world, which has its own grave. Read that list out loud and you can hear exactly who it was aimed at, which was a twelve year old on a shared computer with no ability to say no to an installer.

Each tile was free and each one wanted the same thing. The toolbar was where the search deal lived, and the search deal was where the money lived. That money was real: in the third quarter of 2010, IAC's search revenue rose twenty percent to $205.1 million while operating income in that segment climbed forty-three percent. Every major antivirus vendor classified the Mindspark family as potentially unwanted software, noting that it arrived without meaningful consent and resisted removal. Malwarebytes wrote them up by name in November 2014. None of that dented the quarterly numbers, because the people making the install decision were not the people reading the security blogs.

~ the postmortem ~

What killed it was not enforcement. No regulator ever brought a case against Mindspark, whatever the folklore says. What killed it was that Chrome and Firefox rebuilt their extension systems so an installer could no longer reach into the browser from outside, and Windows started removing this class of software on its own. The distribution channel closed, and a business made entirely of distribution has nothing left underneath.

The last version of mindspark.com was already flying someone else's flag. The page said Ask Applications across the top, claimed more than 120 million monthly active users, and called itself the preeminent name in desktop applications, while the copyright line at the bottom still read Mindspark Interactive Network, Inc. The archive shows that page serving through 26 May 2021 at 1,839 bytes, redirecting away by the 30th, and returning a 404 by the end of June. The stated shutdown date is 1 June 2021, which means the site went quiet a few days before its own deadline.

The domain is alive today, and it is worse than a parking page. mindspark.com in 2026 is a generated content farm with sections called Collectors Corner and Wordplay and Wonder. The current articles are about crossword puzzles and estate sales. A company that spent two decades putting things on your screen that you did not request now exists as a URL doing a cheaper version of the same trick.

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