Smotri.com

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

~ the obit ~

the russian internet ran a parallel version of almost everything in cyrillic, with its own winners, and most of it stayed invisible from where i sat in turkey. smotri.com is one of those names i can look up now but could never have stumbled into then. it was a video site for a country whose web mostly talks to itself, and i was a turkish speaker on ttnet watching the anglophone and the local turkish web, not the runet next door.

smotri started in 2003 out of moscow, early enough that it predates youtube by a couple of years. the pitch was straightforward, upload your clips and watch other people's, and it added a genuinely forward feature for the time, personal live broadcast channels, letting ordinary users stream to an audience. it claimed a monthly reach north of nine million visitors, which put it among the more serious russian video destinations of its decade.

the trouble was that russia had several of these at once, smotri alongside rutube and the video arm of mail.ru, all splitting the same market. youtube kept getting better and more universal, and vk folded video directly into the social network that most russians already lived inside, which quietly ended the standalone-site era. smotri.com held on longer than you might expect before it was finally dissolved in july 2018.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

smotri arrived at the right moment and in the right place, a big internet market with a strong preference for its own services in its own language. that head start bought it fifteen years, which is not nothing. what it could not buy was a defense against a global platform with unlimited storage and a local social network that treated video as a free feature rather than a business.

~ what got buried with it ~

the live-broadcast channels are the part worth remembering. before twitch made personal live streaming a category with a name, smotri was already handing ordinary russians a channel to broadcast from. the idea outlived the site by a wide margin, it just grew up somewhere else, under different flags, for an audience that never knew a moscow video host had gotten there early.

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