nRelate

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

~ the last words ~

nRelate started in New York in 2009 and did one job: look at the article a reader had just finished and suggest the next one. Neil Mody ran it as founder and CEO. The product shipped as WordPress plugins with names that said exactly what they did. nRelate Related Content was the one most people ran; nRelate Most Popular and nRelate Flyout were variations on the same engine. A publisher installed any of them in about a minute, and that ease is most of why it spread. Within three years the company had more than 35,000 publishers on it.

Ask.com announced the acquisition on 2 July 2012. For IAC the appeal was distribution: Ask already had tens of millions of monthly visitors in the United States, and nRelate put IAC code on the bottom of tens of thousands of other people's pages. The business ran as a two-sided market after that. Publishers got recommendations and a revenue share on the sponsored slots, advertisers bought placement across the network, and nRelate sat in the middle taking a cut.

By the end it was substantially bigger than it had been at the sale. The company's own farewell page claims billions of recommendations delivered across more than 100,000 sites and a reach of over 500 million people a month. Those are the numbers it chose to retire on, and nobody has ever had reason to dispute them.

I never installed one of these. Reading the blogs they ran under was unavoidable, though: that strip of thumbnails below the last paragraph, promising more of what you just finished. nRelate's entire pitch to publishers was that it handed them more control over that strip than the competition did. From a reader's chair every one of those strips looked alike, which is most of the reason nobody noticed when one of the companies serving them stopped.

~ the record ~

~ how the money worked ~

A related-content widget is an advertising network wearing editorial clothes. Some of the thumbnails point at the publisher's own archive, which is a free service and the reason anybody installs it. The rest are paid placements sold to advertisers, and the publisher takes a share. nRelate's differentiator was transparency and control: give the publisher a say over the mix, show the reader which items were paid.

The farewell letter is unusually direct about what that was worth by 2014. It asks the industry "to focus less on short-term revenues and more on providing a better reader experience" and hopes companies will "aspire to what we tried to accomplish here at nRelate: more transparency to both publishers and readers about the ads that support the business." Coming from a company announcing its own closure in a market where Taboola and Outbrain were growing, it reads as a verdict on who was winning and on what terms.

~ the farewell page ~

IAC did not close nRelate because it was failing. The letter says the parent "has decided the best way forward for us is not to continue to compete in the marketplace, but instead focus our efforts within IAC's reference-style content properties", and then puts it plainly: "our parent company has proactively opted to internalize our assets for competitive advantage." The engine was worth more serving IAC's own sites than serving everybody else's.

The wind-down ran on a short clock. Publishers were told to strip the tags by 31 December 2014 and that recommendations would serve until 5pm Eastern that day. The reporting dashboard stayed up until Friday 9 January 2015. A 19 December update added a sting for the smallest customers: any publisher whose earned balance was fifty dollars or less had to request payment in writing, with documentation, or go unpaid. Thousands of blogs had balances under fifty dollars.

~ forty-four bytes ~

nrelate.com answers 000 over HTTPS and 200 over plain HTTP, and the 200 is 44 bytes long. There is no page, no parking notice, no redirect to IAC. The server is configured and the site is empty, which is a quieter ending than the farewell letter was aiming for. Meanwhile the tags live on: a decade later you can still find abandoned WordPress installs loading nrelate scripts that have had nothing to serve them since the last hour of 2014.

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