Suntuubi.com

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

~ the obituary ~

Suntuubi.com was in Finnish and in nothing else for most of its life, which settles the question of whether I ever saw it. About five and a half million people speak the language. A free homepage service written for them is a closed room, and the only thing worth saying from outside the door is that this room stayed open for fourteen years, which is longer than almost any of its English-language equivalents managed.

It opened in 2006 on a publishing tool called Putteri. Anyone could take a page and get an image gallery with a guestbook underneath it. A blog and a discussion forum came with that, and there were two plain fields where you put your own HTML and CSS if you knew any. Visitor statistics were standard, because in 2006 the counter was half the reason to have a page at all.

The economy on top of it was odd and rather charming. The site ran an internal currency called Krediitit. Members earned credits and spent them on a proper domain name for their page, or on a bit of advertising to bring visitors to it, and a paid tier called Supertuubi sat above the free one. From spring 2008 the company tried to take the whole thing abroad, with Sweden first and the rest of the Nordics behind it. Central Europe was in the plan as well. The Swedish edition is the only part of it anybody can point to.

~ the case file ~

~ what people built on it ~

The pages were hobby pages. One member wrote an obituary for the site that September, having kept her own there for fourteen years, running a corner of a role-playing community built around a set of small invented creatures. The features she listed are exactly the ones a teenager needs in order to run a fandom: a guestbook and a box for hand-written CSS.

That is the whole category in one sentence. Free homepage services were never really about having a home page. They were the cheapest way for a group of people with a shared obsession to get a shared address, and the guestbook was where the group actually lived.

~ the money question ~

Suntuubi was free and paid for by banner advertising, which is a business that got steadily worse for fifteen straight years. Ad blocking spread and rates fell. The members who had been fifteen in 2006 were thirty by the end, and nobody in that group was clicking a banner.

The company's answer was to change almost nothing. The same member who wrote the obituary noted that the site had looked and worked more or less the same for close to a decade before it closed. For a personal page that you have been decorating since middle school, a platform that never redesigns itself is the best possible platform, right up to the morning it is not there.

~ the goodbye ~

The last version of the front page carried four short Finnish sentences. Suntuubi.com ceased operations on 30 June 2020. Thank you to all our users for these fine years. Keep the internet fun.

~ the archive problem ~

Nothing was handed over. There was no export button anybody has written about and no successor site, so fourteen years of Finnish hobby pages came down together on one Tuesday, minus whatever had been crawled by the Wayback Machine beforehand. The Finnish Wikipedia article on the site can no longer cite a single live page from it, and every one of its references points at an archived copy instead.

The domain is not even parked in the usual sad way. Ask for suntuubi.com today and it hands you straight to Domainkeskus, a Finnish company in the business of selling domain names, which is what happens to a good short word when the thing it belonged to lets go of it.

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