Sugababes.nl

» see sugababes.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sugababes.nl and Superdudes.nl were the same website twice, split by gender, and for most of the 2000s they were where Dutch teenagers lived online. Sugababes was the girls' half. Both went up in 2001, the first profile was opened in the middle of July 2002, and by January 2008 there were more than 1.4 million profiles between the two of them in a country of sixteen million people.

The shape of it was the shape of everything from that era. A profile page with your hobbies and your photos on it, a list of who was online right now, a friend list you had built by hand, and a counter telling you how many people had looked at you today. The one native invention was kudos, a score that other users assigned to your profile by hand, so your standing on the site was a number strangers had voted on directly.

It got big enough to be bought. Telegraaf Media Groep, publisher of the country's largest newspaper, ran both sites as a subsidiary at their peak, when the pair were pulling over a hundred thousand unique visitors a day. In May 2009 TMG sold them to Swigle, a startup founded by people who had worked on Sugababes, which is the polite version of a company handing a declining asset back to the staff who cared about it.

~ the case file ~

~ the sms bar ~

The money came from the chat bar down the side of the front page, and the chat bar cost money to use. Posting a message meant either texting the word TEKST plus your message to 4777 at twenty five cents a go, or ringing 0909-8330 and paying one euro fifteen for the call. Belgians had their own number at 3352 and paid one euro ten. Every message on the public feed of a teenagers' website was a small premium-rate transaction.

You can read the last ones. On 3 October 2012 the bar carried somebody saying sweet dreams, somebody else saying they were tired and it was boring, a person twelve and a half hours into a work day asking for a nice message, and next to each of them the words vandaag 0 bezoekers, today zero visitors. Nine girls and seventeen boys were online across the two sites, and the premium-rate numbers were still printed underneath them.

~ 1 november 2012 ~

The date comes from the buyer's own about page, archived at the end of that month. Superdudes.nl changed owners on 1 November 2012, it says, and the completely renewed setup would make online flirting possible in a modern and fresh way. Four paragraphs down, in the same calm tone, it explains that some of the profiles on the site are fictional and no physical meetings are possible with those, then gets specific about the kinds of encounters you might want to flirt about. Registration is free. Mailing and chatting cost a small fee.

The footer credits Byteplanet as the operator. The names on the about page are a moderator and a helpdesk. Nothing about the transaction was illegal or even unusual. A decade of teenagers' profiles was simply worth less than the search traffic their address still carried, so the address was kept and the profiles were not.

~ where the dutch went ~

None of this reached me and there is no version of it that would have. In 2001 I was seventeen, which is the right age exactly, and in the wrong country entirely. Dutch teenagers had Sugababes and later Hyves; Turkish ones had MSN Messenger and then Hi5, and the Netherlands is one of the few places in Europe that built a homegrown social web big enough that Facebook needed years to finish it off.

What is left is the redirect. Type sugababes.nl into a browser today and you land on a Dutch phone-sex line, which has been the destination since at least 2019 and is still the destination now. The community died in 2012 and the domain has spent longer being a lead generator for premium-rate numbers than it ever spent being what it was named for.

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