ninemsn

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

~ the obituary ~

Half of that name was the most familiar thing on my screen and the other half meant nothing to me at all.

MSN in Turkey was not a portal. MSN was Messenger, and for most of the 2000s it was the program you left running from the moment the machine booted. So the last three letters of ninemsn are letters I typed constantly. The nine in front of them was a television channel in a country I have never been to, and the two halves only fit together if you were Australian.

Microsoft ran this play in a lot of places and the pattern rarely changed. The local broadcaster brings the audience and the content, Microsoft brings Hotmail and the traffic attached to it. Between them the joint venture ends up with a homepage that is very hard to dislodge. In Australia the partner was Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, Kerry Packer's company, which owned the Nine Network and Australian Consolidated Press. The two sides put fifty million dollars between them into it in 1997.

~ the case file ~

~ what it bought ~

For a while it behaved like a company rather than a homepage. In december 2005 it bought HWW, which syndicated the television and film listings across australian media. In 2006 it picked up 5th Finger, an SMS marketing outfit, back when SMS marketing looked like the mobile future rather than a spam channel.

A redesign in mid-2011 brought a new logo and let people rearrange their own homepage. That was the last era in which anyone seriously believed a person would sit down and arrange a homepage.

~ how it actually ended ~

Microsoft left first. On 14 october 2013 it sold its fifty percent of Mi9, the company running the site, to Nine Entertainment, and Mi9 became Nine Digital. Microsoft stayed on as an advertising partner, so the commercial relationship outlived the ownership. So did the name, which is the odd part. For nearly three years the site carried the initials of a partner who had already sold and gone.

The rebrand was announced on 11 may 2016 and landed on 28 june. Ninemsn became nine.com.au, and the sub-brands were renamed to match: 9Coach, 9Finance, 9Honey, 9Kitchen and the rest of them. By november that same year most had been folded back under 9Honey and 9Lifestyle was closed outright, which is roughly the usual half-life of a rebrand's sub-brands.

~ what got buried with it ~

The portal died, not the website. nine.com.au is still there and it is a news site, which is a smaller and clearer thing than what ninemsn was. A portal was a homepage trying to be the entire first screen of your internet: mail, news, weather, chat, horoscopes, and a search box hoping you would not go somewhere else with it.

Those things came apart into separate apps and separate habits. The last thing holding them together in one place was usually a webmail account, and once the mail moved to its own address and its own icon, the reason to keep a national portal went with it. What is left is the name, which for nineteen years described an arrangement between a television network and a software company and now describes nothing.

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