PopEater

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

~ the goodbye ~

American celebrity gossip in the late 2000s was a genre with its own economy, and PopEater was AOL's entry into it. The domain had been sitting around as a music site until September 2008, when AOL redesigned it into a general pop culture desk on the same day it took the wraps off Lemondrop. Both were part of a push to turn a dying dial-up company into a publisher.

It ran the standard beat of the period: red carpet photos, network TV recaps, reality show fallout, and a video series fronted by Rob Shuter under the name Naughty But Nice, which AOL said had pulled close to six million views since launching in January 2011. That figure came from the company's own press push, and it is the only traffic number PopEater ever left behind.

Then AOL bought The Huffington Post. The deal was announced in February 2011 and closed in March, Arianna Huffington took editorial control of everything, and on 28 June the company said it was cutting fifty-three brands down to twenty. PopEater was not one of the twenty.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Where I was, this whole category arrived secondhand. Turkish celebrity coverage had its own outlets and its own famous people, and the American gossip machine reached Turkey mostly as translated wire items about actors whose films you had seen. A site built entirely around knowing who was feuding with whom in Los Angeles needs readers who follow those feuds daily, and those readers were somewhere else.

PopEater's real problem was closer to home anyway. TMZ had launched in 2005 with a newsroom and a checkbook, and Perez Hilton owned the personality slot. The space AOL was trying to enter was full before it got there.

~ the twenty brands ~

The June 2011 consolidation is a more interesting document than anything PopEater published. Roughly thirty AOL properties were folded into survivors that summer. Politics Daily went into HuffPost Politics, Urlesque into HuffPost Comedy, WalletPop into DailyFinance, Luxist into StyleList. PopEater went into HuffPost Celebrity, which HuffPost had launched in July while the old site was still updating around it.

The archive puts the switch on a specific day. Captures of popeater.com return the site's own front page through 15 September 2011 and a redirect from 16 September. Nobody posted a goodbye. The site simply answered a different address one morning, and everything it had published went into a bigger archive under someone else's masthead.

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