Productopia

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

~ the eulogy ~

Productopia started in 1998 in San Francisco with a question that felt urgent at the time. You have a browser open and a credit card on the desk, so how do you decide which toaster to buy? The answer it built was editorial rather than algorithmic. Writers on staff worked through 634 product categories and published advice that no manufacturer had paid for. Investors liked the idea enough to put in roughly $22 million, with CMGI's @Ventures arm leading and Bessemer Venture Partners alongside.

In October 2000 I was sixteen, in Ankara, on a dial-up line. Online shopping in Turkey was a thing you read about, not a thing you did, and the products Productopia rated were sold in stores I had no way of reaching. A site built to stand between an American shopper and an American checkout page had no version of itself that could have found me.

The money stopped in the first week of October 2000. Staff were called together and the executives wept in front of them. The statement that went out said Productopia had ceased operations. Nobody got severance. The website kept answering requests for a while afterward, the way abandoned sites do, but the company was finished a little over two years after it opened.

~ the dossier ~

~ what the money bought ~

Twenty two million dollars is a strange amount to spend on opinions about blenders, and that was more or less the plan. Productopia's product was human judgment at scale: editors researching a category, ranking what was in it, writing it up in language a shopper could act on. The pitch to advertisers and to investors was that independence would be the thing people came back for, since every other buying guide of the period was either a manufacturer's brochure or a store's own shelf talker wearing a website.

What it never solved was the part between the advice and the money. Reading a recommendation is free. Getting paid for having produced it means either selling the reader to a merchant or selling the merchant to the reader, and both of those undo the independence that was the entire point. The company was still working on that in 2000 when the market it depended on evaporated.

~ the week it ran out ~

The venture capitalists had visited earlier that year and given a pep talk. Employees read it as a vote of confidence, which is a reasonable thing to read a pep talk as. A few months later the same investors did the arithmetic and concluded that even a profitable Productopia in 2001 would never be profitable enough to justify another round, and that was that. CEO Roger Neal did not return calls from reporters covering the closure.

By December of that year the trade press had a follow-up story about the people who had been laid off, and the story was that most of them were fine. Half had already found work within a month, several at higher salaries than they had been on. The 2000 shakeout took the companies first and left the labor market intact for another year. Productopia's staff got out early enough that the year still had jobs in it.

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