Putfile

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

~ the eulogy ~

putfile launched in january 2004 from godalming, surrey, a small commuter town southwest of london, founded by gordon page. it offered free hosting for video and photos at a moment when the only other place to put a short video clip was your own webspace or a paid file host that would delete it after a week.

youtube did not exist yet. youtube came almost a year later, in february 2005. for that twelve-month window putfile was one of a small handful of services where you could drop an.avi or a.mov and get back a shareable url. it picked up the kind of organic growth a free service with no competition picks up: forum signatures, myspace embeds, links posted in irc.

then youtube arrived and absorbed almost all of the consumer video traffic within a year. putfile stayed open and tried to compete on rankings and genre pages, which worked for a while because the user-generated supply was already there. in february 2007 zvue corporation, an internet-media holding company that also owned ebaumsworld.com, bought putfile. that was the high point.

i missed putfile. in 2005 i was 21, on ttnet broadband at home in ankara, and the video category for me was youtube and bittorrent. putfile was a name i did not encounter until i started looking at lists of pre-youtube video hosts, years later. its audience was largely anglophone, mostly american by traffic share once ebaumsworld pulled it into orbit, and the brand never made the jump to my forums.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

putfile's pitch was simplicity. you uploaded a file and got back a link you could embed anywhere. accounts were optional at the start. quotas existed on paper but were easy to work around. the site looked like a phpbb forum more than a media product, which was correct for 2004.

~ the unraveling ~

zvue's business model was buying media properties at a discount and running them lean. by 2008 the company was struggling. on 31 january 2009 zvue terminated eric bauman and his staff at ebaumsworld and moved the operation into its san francisco offices. putfile's staff were already gone by that point. on 14 october 2008 the site had stopped accepting new uploads and new user registrations.

~ the postmortem ~

on 23 april 2009 putfile.com went offline without a press release or any kind of notice. anyone visiting the domain got redirected to ebaumsworld.com, which had become zvue's only remaining consumer property of any note. five years of user-uploaded video and photos disappeared on the same morning. the wayback machine has scattered captures from the active years; that is the only place you can still see what putfile actually hosted.

zvue itself stayed alive on paper for a few more years and ebaumsworld is still trading in 2026 under different ownership. putfile is the part of the holding company that did not survive consolidation.

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