Squidoo

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

~ the goodbye ~

squidoo sat in the seth godin orbit, that part of the us blogger economy where people read his books on permission marketing and called themselves lensmasters without flinching. it launched in october 2005 as a hand-built single-topic publishing tool, where each "lens" focused on one product or hobby or charity and earned its writer a share of the ad revenue. the format was a midpoint between a wikipedia article, an amazon affiliate page and a personal blog post.

in turkey in 2005 i was finishing a computer engineering degree. my blogging at the time was on blogger.com with a turkish domain pointed at it, and the local writing-for-money category was instead about donanimhaber forum reputation than about ad-revenue platforms. squidoo never reached me. it was a us-anglophone-blogger product about earning small ad checks for niche content, served by a platform that took 50 percent of revenue and routed a chunk to user-selected charities. the model required a specific demographic of content-makers that did not really exist in turkey at the time.

the peak numbers were real. by october 2010 squidoo hosted about 1.5 million lenses and ranked as a top-100 us web property by traffic. seth godin claimed lensmasters had earned around 35 million dollars cumulatively across the platform's life. the site won an sxsw community award in 2007. for a window between 2007 and 2010 it was one of the standard examples of "people earn money making content" alongside ehow and hubpages itself.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

squidoo's growth ran on google search traffic. lensmasters wrote pages targeting long-tail keyword combinations that the lensmaster thought might rank, like "best gift ideas for a fly-fishing uncle" or "what is the difference between two specific kitchen appliances". google sent traffic, ads inside the lens converted, the platform split the revenue with the lensmaster, the lensmaster wrote more lenses. the cycle worked while google's algorithm treated long-tail informational pages as legitimate sources.

the site also leaned hard on charitable opt-in routing. lensmasters could direct part of their share to a chosen nonprofit, and squidoo marketed that as the platform's social-good story. seth godin used the charity framing as the cultural pitch in interviews. that framing worked for press coverage and partly insulated squidoo's brand from the "content farm" label that ehow and demand media were already getting by 2009.

~ the decline ~

google panda landed in february 2011. the algorithm specifically targeted thin, low-quality, high-volume content sites, and squidoo took a serious hit on the first wave. subsequent panda iterations through 2012 and 2013 hit harder. lens traffic collapsed. lensmasters earned less, wrote fewer lenses, abandoned dormant accounts. by 2013 squidoo's traffic was back to its 2008 levels and falling.

on 15 august 2014 seth godin announced that hubpages was acquiring squidoo. only "featured" lenses, the ones with a green-checkmark editorial approval, were eligible to migrate. content migration began 2 september 2014. non-featured lenses were given a window to opt out, then deleted. the rest of the squidoo platform was shut down through october 2014.

~ the long tail ~

hubpages itself ran through its own panda decline over the following decade and by 2026 operates at a fraction of its mid-2010s size. the lensmaster identity did not survive the move, hubpages absorbed the featured content as regular articles under its own brand. seth godin moved on to other projects and stopped referencing squidoo in his writing within a couple of years of the sale.

the broader category squidoo belonged to, user-generated long-tail content earning ad-share revenue, was effectively over by 2015. google's algorithm had decided what counted as a useful informational page, and the small-author revenue-share platform did not survive that decision. wikipedia absorbed the encyclopedic side. youtube and tiktok absorbed the personality side. the niche-product page lensmaster, who wrote a useful guide for an obscure topic and got paid for traffic, mostly stopped writing.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »