RapidShare

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

~ the obit ~

in 2002 a german named christian schmid added file hosting to his forum software product. the file hosting feature outgrew everything else and became rapidshare. by 2006 the company had moved from mulheim to baar, switzerland, and rebranded around its new core. the model was almost defiantly simple. you uploaded a file, you got a url, and you posted that url somewhere. there was no search, no index, no public catalog. anything you wanted from rapidshare you found through a forum post or a chat message.

that constraint made rapidshare what it was. forums of the era turned into rapidshare-link aggregators. warez communities and music release sites lived inside rapidshare's url scheme. tv-rip boards and scanlation groups built their whole posting habit around it. you zipped your archive into 100MB parts because that was the free upload limit, then pasted the links into your forum post with the rar password underneath.

at peak, around 2009, rapidshare was a top-20 most visited site on the web with capacity for three million simultaneous users. premium accounts paid for unlimited download speed and bigger storage, while the free tier was throttled enough to push casual users toward upgrading. by 2010 the company had hundreds of millions of monthly visitors, most of whom never saw the homepage.

then megaupload was raided in january 2012 and the air went out of the room. rapidshare watched its peers get prosecuted and pivoted. the limits on free accounts tightened, and the affiliate program for uploaders was canceled. the company tried to position itself as a B2B cloud storage provider, which the existing user base ignored. by february 2015 the company announced it could not sustain a viable business. on march 31 the lights went off.

rapidshare was the back-end of the turkish forum scene through the broadband years. donanimhaber and frmtr stickies ran on rapidshare links with the rar password underneath. the etiquette around mirroring across rapidshare and megaupload became its own subculture. when megaupload fell in 2012, the question of which mirror was still alive turned into a daily forum question.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it worked ~

the upload page was a single button. the file went up. you got a download url and a delete url, and that was your entire interaction with the company until you ran out of patience with the free-tier countdown timer and bought a premium account. premium meant no waits and no captcha. it also unlocked parallel downloads through a manager like jdownloader.

jdownloader is the part nobody talks about anymore. it was the german open-source app that let you paste a list of rapidshare links and have it queue them automatically, solving captchas and waiting through the cooldown. for several years jdownloader and rapidshare were a single experience. one was the host. the other was how you actually used the host.

~ the squeeze ~

the music industry sued rapidshare in germany in the late 2000s and won. the company was forced to filter known infringing files and pre-screen uploads, which broke the model. then megaupload's prosecution in 2012 made every cyberlocker an obvious target. rapidshare cut its affiliate program in 2012 and dropped free unlimited storage. its traffic collapsed over the next two years. the B2B pivot was a face-saving exit, not a business plan.

~ what came after ~

mega.nz inherited the cyberlocker baton from kim dotcom's prison-bait sequel project. mediafire and zippyshare absorbed some of the long tail. but the era of one website being the obvious place to upload a file ended with rapidshare. cloud storage moved into google drive and dropbox. piracy moved to torrents and streaming. the forum-link convention died with its host.

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