NexTag

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

~ the obituary ~

NexTag never reached Turkey at any scale worth measuring. Price comparison is the most local product category there is, because it is nothing but a list of merchants who will ship to you, and a merchant in California will not. Turkey grew its own comparison sites on the same idea a few years later, and the American ones were something you read about rather than used.

It opened in May 1999 in Redwood Shores, founded by Mark Bradley and Purnendu Ojha along with Rafael Ortiz. The original product was not comparison at all. It was a negotiation site, where you named a price for a computer or a piece of electronics and sellers came back at you, which is a good idea that has never once worked at consumer scale. In 2000 they turned it into a shopping comparison engine and it started making money.

The business underneath was pay per click. A merchant paid NexTag every time somebody clicked through to its store, and NexTag bought the traffic to send by ranking well in Google for phrases like the model number of a printer. That arrangement produced a decade of very good years. In June 2007 Providence Equity Partners bought a two thirds stake for eight hundred and thirty million dollars, valuing the whole thing near one and a quarter billion.

Ten years later the site had gone quiet enough that its last tweet was from May 2017. The domain stopped resolving on or about 28 December 2018. There was no announcement and no press release, and the trade press only worked out that it had happened because merchants noticed the traffic had stopped.

~ the case file ~

~ the good years ~

For most of the 2000s a comparison shopper occupied a genuinely useful place. Search engines were good at documents and bad at products, and a merchant's own site would never tell you that the same printer was forty dollars cheaper elsewhere. NexTag kept price history, which mattered when a product had been listed at four different prices in four weeks, and it ran an ecosystem of partner sites on its platform.

It bought its way outward from there. NextCoupons.com in November 2010, the German comparison site Guenstiger.de in April 2011, then Thingbuzz in October 2011 and FanSnap in December 2011. By 2016 it had over three hundred and fifty employees. The category around it was crowded and all of it depended on the same thing, which was Google sending people to a page of prices rather than showing prices itself.

~ the day the traffic left ~

Google stopped doing that. Product listings arrived in search results with an image and a price and a merchant name attached, and later a paid shopping carousel sat across the top of the page. A person looking for the cheapest price on a printer got an answer without leaving the search page, and the click that NexTag sold to merchants never happened, because the user was never on NexTag to begin with.

There is a version of this story that treats it as unfair, and the European Commission eventually fined Google over exactly this behavior in 2017. There is another version where a business built entirely on ranking well in somebody else's index was always a tenancy. Both are true. The comparison shopping industry spent its last decade consolidating into fewer and fewer names, and NexTag was one of the ones that ran out.

~ the postmortem ~

Nothing was said. A site that had been worth over a billion dollars and had employed hundreds of people took itself off the internet between Christmas and New Year, and the first public record of its death is a reader writing to a trade newsletter on 7 January 2019 to ask whether anybody else had noticed. Somebody replied with two words. RIP Nextag.

The domain still answers today. It returns a valid response with an empty body of zero bytes, no page behind it and nowhere to redirect to, which is a stranger thing to find than a parked page or a dead lookup. Somebody is paying the renewal on a name that serves nothing.

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