Multiply

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

~ the goodbye ~

multiply launched in march 2004, founded by peter pezaris with michael gersh and david hersh as co-founders. the original idea was a social network organized around real-world relationships rather than open friend networks. you signed up, mapped your actual family and friends into a graph, and the site let you share photo albums and blog posts with the specific people who would care. for the first few years it was one of several US social networks competing for the post-friendster wave, and it never got close to the scale of myspace or facebook in the english-speaking market.

the second life happened in southeast asia. by 2008 multiply had become one of the dominant social networks in the philippines and a major player in indonesia. the photo-album format fit how filipino and indonesian users actually wanted to use the web: large family galleries and long-running blogs, with comment threads on event pictures from weddings and birthdays. the platform got an organic adoption curve in those countries that the company had not planned for. by 2010 the philippines and indonesia together accounted for the majority of active users.

i never used multiply. i was in turkey, on hyves-adjacent and msn-shaped networks during multiply's peak years, and the platform never built any traction there. multiply for me was a name in techcrunch articles about southeast asian internet markets, not a site i would have signed up for. the network's gravity was on the other side of the world. when it went dark in 2013 i read about the shutdown the same way i read about renren in china or mixi in japan, as the loss of a place that other people had lived in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it died ~

the company moved its headquarters to jakarta in early 2012 to be closer to its biggest market. that summer ceo stefan magdalinski announced that multiply would pivot away from social networking entirely and focus on e-commerce. blogs and photos and videos and messaging were all scheduled for shutdown. the new product was a marketplace where the existing user base could buy and sell to each other, modeled on what alibaba had built in china. the bet was that an existing trusted network was a better starting point for a southeast asian e-commerce site than a green-field marketplace.

the pivot did not work in time. the social features went dark on march 21, 2013. the e-commerce business launched but ran straight into competition from tokobagus and sulit, plus the regional expansion of lazada and olx. the indonesian arm of multiply filed for bankruptcy at the central jakarta commercial court in may 2013, two months after the social site closed. the parent company in the US officially wound up on april 1, 2015. when multiply users in indonesia and the philippines went looking for an e-commerce alternative, most of them ended up on tokobagus or sulit, both of which olx later bought.

~ what remains ~

the lost photo archive of mid-2000s southeast asian web. multiply was where a generation of filipino bloggers stored their family photos and their wedding albums, the kids growing up across years of posts. when the social site shut down in 2013 the company offered a small export window, but plenty of users missed it. a lot of personal photo history that had been hosted on multiply.com is gone. the philippines lost a chunk of its 2005 to 2012 personal-internet record in a single shutdown date.

the lesson about pivoting late. multiply tried to convert a social network into a marketplace in less than a year, in a region where bigger funded competitors were already moving fast. the social user base did not transfer cleanly because the trust that worked for sharing baby pictures did not automatically work for buying a phone from a stranger. by the time the pivot was complete, the local marketplaces had taken the audience. the multiply story sits in a small folder of cautionary tales about asking the same users to do something completely different.

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