ShareYourWorld.com

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

~ the obituary ~

shareyourworld sat in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot personally remember. 1997 was pre-online for me. i got a dial-up modem at home the year after, and even once i was on the wire the idea of uploading a video clip to a stranger's server over a 33.6k line was not something anyone in my orbit was doing. that whole product category was ahead of the bandwidth that would have made it usable in turkey by roughly a decade.

of my life, in those days. chase norlin launched shareyourworld.com in 1997 from california. the pitch was straightforward and eight years too early. users could upload short video clips in any file format they had, encode aside, and get a URL they could share with anyone else on the web. no plug-in required to view. no proprietary player. the video played in whatever your browser could handle at the time, which in 1997 mostly meant either quicktime or realplayer downloading the file and playing it in a separate window.

i was not around for it, either way, but the thing to understand is that in 1997 there was no youtube-shaped hole in the market yet. consumer video capture was still expensive. camcorders were tape-based and needed a capture card to get anything digital off them. the low-end webcams that were already common recorded thumbnail-sized frames at slow frame rates. the raw material for a mass video-upload service basically did not exist yet at the consumer level.

~ the case file ~

~ what got buried with it ~

the bandwidth math was the killer. hosting a single arbitrary user video meant paying for the storage plus paying for the outbound bandwidth each time someone else clicked play. neither number was small in 1997. a t1 line ran a few thousand dollars a month for 1.5 mbit of outbound capacity. one popular video clip could saturate the whole line for hours. modern CDNs did not exist. akamai was founded in 1998 and did not have consumer-video pricing until years later. cloud object storage was not a thing.

the funding side of the equation was equally rough. shareyourworld ran on a mix of small venture money and personal capital. no meaningful ad monetization path existed for video content on the open web at that scale. banner ads paid pennies. video pre-roll had not been invented. the subscription model for consumer video content that would later fund netflix streaming was decades away from being viable at the bandwidth costs of the era. norlin kept the site running through the late '90s but the unit economics never got close to positive.

~ the day it died ~

the specifics of when shareyourworld actually turned off the servers are surprisingly hard to pin down. the site was operational through 2000 and gone by 2002. the best public estimates put the shutdown around 2001, which lines up with the broader dot-com collapse cycle that took most of the small consumer web companies burning cash on speculative traffic. no press release marked the death. the domain lapsed and the servers went dark. one of the earliest video-sharing services on the open web ended without an announcement.

chase norlin himself did not stop working on video. later in the 2000s he founded pixsy, which built a video-and-audio search engine before pivoting into an image-copyright enforcement business. the shareyourworld chapter became a footnote in his biography once youtube launched in 2005 and instantly did at scale what he had tried to do at bandwidth-limited scale eight years earlier.

~ the long tail ~

in fairness the timing gap between shareyourworld and youtube maps almost perfectly onto the timing gap between 33.6k modem access and mass broadband penetration. by 2005 most US home connections were on cable or DSL delivering 1-5 mbit down. flash video (a plug-in a very large fraction of browsers already had installed) could play a small clip smoothly at that bandwidth. cheap camera phones with video modes were reaching the low-end market. cheap on-demand server hosting was reaching startups that could not afford a colo cage. youtube caught the same wave that would have carried shareyourworld if it had launched eight years later.

the shareyourworld failure is a bandwidth story, not a product story. the product worked. the market did not exist at the price the technology could deliver in 1997. that is a very different obit shape from most graves here, which usually die from product problems or from acquirer indifference. shareyourworld died because the physics of a T1 line in 1997 did not permit its business model at any funding level.

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