Sugarscape.com

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

~ the obit ~

A teen magazine's website is a strange thing to write an obituary for, because the magazine was already five years dead by the time the site was doing its best numbers. Sugarscape.com outlived its parent and then got closed anyway.

Sugar went on sale in October 1994, published by Attic Futura, aimed at British girls in their teens. The debut issue moved 205,000 copies. It was bought by Hachette Filipacchi in 2002 and ran for seventeen years, and by the end its circulation had fallen from a quarter of a million to 113,320, which is the shape of every teen print title in that decade.

Hachette announced the closure in January 2011 and the last issue came out that April. The website, launched in 2007, was explicitly kept. That was the standard move of the period: kill the paper and keep the domain, then tell everyone the brand lives on. Occasionally it even worked.

This is not my internet and it never was. Sugarscape was written for British women between sixteen and twenty four, and I fail that description on every count. What makes it worth a grave is that it is one of the few cases where the website part of a dying magazine actually grew, and it got shut down regardless.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ from print to the site ~

The transfer to Hearst is the part that decided everything. Lagardere sold Hachette's magazine business, and the UK titles ended up with Hearst, owner of the National Magazine Company and therefore of Cosmopolitan. From that moment Sugarscape was inside a house that already had a women's brand with a much larger footprint.

For a few years it did not matter, because the site was working. Editorial was fast and loud, built around celebrity and boybands, which suited a readership that lived on the sharing web. Kate Lucey edited it through its best stretch. The comment threads under a boyband post were the actual product, and the numbers reflected it.

~ the numbers hearst liked ~

Under Hearst the traffic went up 592 percent, from around 120,000 unique visitors a month to more than 830,000. Page impressions went from about a million to over seven million. In January 2012 more than half a million of the monthly visits were coming from phones, an eight hundred percent jump on the year before, at a point when most publishers were still arguing about whether mobile mattered.

That growth curve is the thing that makes the ending odd. This was not a site quietly dying of neglect. It was a site that had made the print-to-digital transition on paper and still could not turn a teenage audience into money at a rate that justified its slot in the portfolio. Teenagers were on free platforms and advertisers could reach them there without paying an editorial team.

~ the goodbye posts ~

The closure was announced late in 2016 for the end of the year, with Reveal.co.uk going at the same time. There was a Change.org petition to save it, which is the twenty-first century version of a letter to the editor and has roughly the same success rate.

The interesting residue is on the personal blogs. A number of people who had written for the site, or grown up reading it, posted farewells in November and December of 2016, and those posts are now easier to find than the site they were about. Sugarscape.com resolves to Cosmopolitan today. Nine years of teenage internet went into a redirect, and the readership it had built went where it was always going to go, which was Twitter and Tumblr.

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