Moonfruit

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

~ the obit ~

For one week in june 2009 a british website builder owned the top of Twitter's trending list by giving away a MacBook Pro every day for ten days to anybody who typed #moonfruit. That is the only way Moonfruit ever crossed into my field of view, and it crossed as a hashtag rather than as a product. Twitter adjusted how trends were calculated not long afterward, which tells you how well it worked.

Underneath the stunt: a drag and drop website builder from London, launched in january 2000 while the bubble was still inflating, free and paid for by advertising. When the advertising money evaporated along with everything else, it became a subscription service. The London staff bought the company out at some point after that, which is a quieter fate than most things launched in january 2000 got.

The editor ran in Flash, and in 2000 that was the only honest way to give a non-technical person a canvas in a browser, let them drag a box onto it, and have the box stay where they put it. HTML could not do that yet. Flash could, so a whole generation of consumer web tools was built inside the plugin, with Moonfruit among the most successful of them in Britain.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

The numbers are real and they are large. Over 3.5 million sites had been built with Moonfruit by april 2011. That reached 5.66 million by the end of 2012, with 4.4 million of them already up when 2011 closed. Turnover went from 1.9 million dollars in 2009 to nearly 4 million the following year. The SiteMaker subsidiary, which resold Gandi domain registrations to Moonfruit customers, lost 1.26 million pounds in 2011, and that is the figure which explains what happened next.

On 16 may 2012 Yell, the company that used to print the Yellow Pages and was busy working out what it would be instead, bought Moonfruit for 23 million pounds. A directory business buying a site builder made sense on paper. Yell's customers were small businesses that needed a web presence and could not build one, and Moonfruit was a machine for producing exactly that.

~ the day it died ~

Flash killed it, slowly and then on a published schedule. Adobe announced in 2017 that the plugin would stop at the end of 2020, and the browser vendors removed it on time. Moonfruit had been working around the problem since 2013, when it added an HTML5 rendering path so that sites built in the Flash editor would at least display on an iPhone. That bought roughly eight years.

The free tier went first. On 8 august 2016 Moonfruit announced it would stop offering free websites, giving owners ninety days to start paying or watch the site be deleted. Then Yell signed a partnership with Wix and the arithmetic stopped working entirely. Moonfruit was decommissioned on 7 december 2021, and Yell's own support page states the reason without decoration: the platform was built on Adobe Flash, which is no longer supported and does not deliver a reliable experience in modern browsers.

~ the long tail ~

The migration to Wix was automated and partial. Pages moved across, but online stores, blogs, booking systems and member-only pages could not be carried over and had to be rebuilt by hand, which for a small business is the same sentence as start again. Yell counted more than five million websites and 230,000 online stores in the estate it was closing, and the customer complaints about the handover ran for months.

There is a specific loss here that Wix could never have addressed. Twenty one years of Moonfruit sites were Flash documents, and the editor that made them is gone along with the runtime that displayed them. A Geocities page from 1998 still renders today because it was HTML that a browser could keep reading. A Moonfruit page from 2004 does not, because it was a.swf, and the thing required to look at it was switched off by four browser vendors on a coordinated timetable.

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