Speedyclick.com

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

~ the last words ~

The free-prizes web of 1999 had one hard edge for anybody outside North America, and it was not technical. The prize had to be mailed. You could reach the site from a dial-up line in Ankara perfectly well and watch the counter go up, and then you hit a shipping form that only wanted a US state. That is the honest distance on this one, and it applied to the entire category.

Speedyclick ran out of Glendale, California from roughly 1998. It was an entertainment site in the sense the period meant it: bingo and blackjack that paid out nothing, plus contests and some original content nobody remembers. The point was time on page. The longer you stayed, the more of its own money it gave you.

By 1999 it was claiming more than three million visitors a month and over a million registered accounts, with an audience heavily weighted toward women. The figure the sales deck led with was reach: something over seven percent of all women on the internet had been on Speedyclick. In a year when nobody could measure anything, a number like that was worth more than revenue, because revenue was not really on offer anywhere.

~ the record ~

~ what a speedybuck was ~

The currency is the part worth keeping. SpeedyBucks accumulated while you used the site and came out the other end as clothing or a mousepad. What made it stranger than a loyalty scheme is that members could trade them with each other in a bartering area laid out to resemble eBay, so the currency had a secondary market inside a site that also controlled the supply.

There was no exchange rate out. You could not turn SpeedyBucks into dollars, only into merchandise the company chose to stock, which meant the balance in your account was a number the issuer could revalue by changing the catalog. Every points economy since has worked this way, and airlines still do it. Speedyclick just did it with mousepads and without a frequent-flyer program's ability to make you care.

~ the fifty million ~

In november 1999 ShopNow.com bought Speedyclick for forty seven million dollars in ShopNow stock plus three million in cash. Read the ratio rather than the total. The sellers were paid almost entirely in paper issued by a company whose own value rested on the same assumptions that made Speedyclick look like a fifty million dollar asset.

ShopNow renamed itself Network Commerce in may 2000 and repositioned as a business-to-business operation, keeping the consumer sites running underneath. That rebrand is the tell. The consumer web had stopped being the story before the money stopped arriving.

~ the postmortem ~

Network Commerce came off the NASDAQ and spent 2001 being chased by the people who had funded it. Speedyclick went with the parent, quietly, sometime before the end of that year. There is no shutdown notice on record and no farewell page in the archives, which is normal for this class of death: the servers belonged to a company that had bigger problems than telling a million registered accounts where their SpeedyBucks went.

The domain still answers today. It returns a hundred and fourteen bytes of type-in traffic harvesting, which is the standard afterlife for a name that used to get three million visitors a month.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »