MSN Autos

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

~ the obit ~

carpoint never reached turkey. car-buying in turkey ran on entirely different sites under entirely different brands. by '07 the turkish equivalent of an msn-autos lookup was a search on sahibinden.com (the country's everything-classifieds portal). carpoint was an american product anchored in american assumptions: dealer inventories you could query by zip code, sticker prices in dollars, kbb book values, vin lookups against the carfax database. the turkish car market in the same decade had none of that infrastructure online.

microsoft shipped carpoint in october 1995 as one of the first wave of properties that defined the msn brand. carpoint was paired with sidewalk for city guides and expedia for travel, as microsoft's bet that the web would be organized into branded verticals owned by aol or microsoft or yahoo, each running a different chunk of the consumer information economy. carpoint covered the car-research vertical. the timing was good. the dot-com boom raised the value of any vertical that could attract advertiser dollars, and car dealers were among the biggest advertisers in the offline economy moving online.

the rebrand to msn carpoint happened in stages, with carpoint.ca becoming msn autos canada in february 2003 as one of the country-by-country pieces. the unified msn autos brand replaced carpoint across the english markets by mid-2000s. by then the product had moved from a transactional car-buying site (research vehicles, contact dealers) to a more editorial vertical with reviews and news alongside the listings. it was the auto-content tile of the msn home page for most of the '00s for a default-msn american broadband household.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

the carpoint product in '95-2000 worked because microsoft had distribution. msn was the default home page on every windows machine that shipped with ie set as the browser, and msn's network of verticals got a free ad on every consumer pc in america. carpoint's traffic in that period was not earned through better search rankings (google did not exist yet, and msn search was msn's own captive). it was earned through default-portal flow. you opened your browser. msn was there. carpoint was a tab away.

when google arrived and broke the portal model in the early '00s, msn autos lost its default-traffic moat. independent auto sites like edmunds and kbb had no microsoft equivalent on the editorial side. cars.com and autotrader had no msn equivalent on the listings side. msn autos survived for another decade on inertia plus the captive content slot inside the msn home page. the era when microsoft owned the car-research vertical ended around when google became the front door to the internet.

~ what it became ~

the september 30 2014 msn redesign was the public moment that closed the msn autos chapter. microsoft relaunched msn.com with a stripped-down content-aggregator model: a feed of headlines pulled from outside publishers grouped under category tiles (news, money, autos, and the rest). the dedicated autos.msn.com vertical with original editorial and pricing tools was retired into a thin "autos" tile pulling outside automotive feeds. the carpoint database and the editorial team went into the box that microsoft was no longer operating.

the people who had been on msn autos in the '00s were on edmunds or kbb by then anyway. nobody noticed the september 2014 change as a death, because the product had already become a memory by the time microsoft officially retired the brand. it was a slow fade, then one quiet tuesday the autos vertical was a content tile, not a destination.

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