Pathfinder

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

~ the obituary ~

pathfinder was a magazine rack with a url. i came online in 1998 on a modem that topped out at 33.6k, four years after it opened and one year before it closed, and by then the argument was already settled. nobody typed pathfinder.com to reach time. they typed time.com.

it went live on 24 october 1994, which makes it one of the first things anybody would now recognize as a web portal. time inc. put its catalog behind that single address, and at its widest the site carried around eighty content providers, most of them time inc. titles with the cnn properties alongside them. the number usually attached to the whole exercise is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and twenty million dollars, and jupiter communications had it losing about eight million a year toward the end.

i can describe the thing from its own last pages rather than from memory. an archived copy from 8 may 1999, twelve days after time warner announced the site was finished, still carries the full left rail: cnn, cnnfn, cnnsi, time daily, time digital, time asia, fortune investor, money markets, mutual funds, life, asiaweek, si for kids, travel and leisure. under that sits a free email service with a login box. under that, a shopping row pointing at giftfinder, barnesandnoble.com, outpost.com, officedepot.com.

it reads exactly like a portal because it was one, and the category had already been decided against by the time that page was captured.

~ the case file ~

~ what one address was supposed to do ~

in 1994 a magazine company looking at the web saw a distribution problem it thought it already knew how to solve. you do not sell a magazine one at a time to a stranger who wandered past. you sell the subscription, and you sell the rack. pathfinder was the rack: one address, one advertising sales conversation covering eighty properties, and a house brand strong enough that a reader would come back to the shelf instead of to any single title on it.

what the web did instead was make the shelf pointless. a link from anywhere landed you on the article and not on the front door. search got good enough that the front door became a detour. and the individual magazines had names worth more than the portal wrapped around them, which is the part that turned into an internal fight.

~ the fight inside the building ~

the loudest objection came from inside time warner. pathfinder's existence meant the magazines could not use their own urls, so the strongest brands in american publishing were reachable only as a turning inside somebody else's lobby. editors hated it. the numbers backed them up: almost all of the company's web traffic was already flowing to money.com and time.com by 1999.

jeffrey coomes, a vice president at time warner new media, gave the reason plainly when it ended. the decision to dismantle pathfinder was based on the fact that most consumers went directly to the individual magazine sites and skipped the pathfinder home page. that is not a strategy that failed at the last minute. that is readers voting with the address bar for five years while the company kept paying for the lobby.

~ the announcement and the summer after ~

the news broke on 26 april 1999 and time warner played it down. a spokesman said the site would close in a few months, the delay being the work of changing web addresses across the properties to take the pathfinder designation out of them. news.com had it first, salon wrote it up on 4 may under the headline pathfinder, we hardly knew ye.

the machine outlived the announcement by a season, and the archive is unusually thick here. more than fifty thousand pathfinder.com urls were captured between june and early september 1999. money's city charts were still serving real pages on 28 may. life's convention photo galleries were still serving on 19 august, four months after the site was reported dead. by 8 september the root had turned into a redirector handing requests for fortune somewhere else, and by 21 september those chart urls were returning 404. when the archive picks the domain up again in january 2000 it is a plain redirect to time.com. so the honest death here is 1999 with no month attached, because april is when the decision was announced and not when the lights went off.

the conclusion time warner drew from all of it was that running an internet portal was not something it could do. in january 2000 it agreed to merge with aol, which had one. pathfinder.com today redirects to dotdash meredith, a company assembled out of what was left of the same magazine business.

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