The 9 on Yahoo

» see the9.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the summer of 2006 the biggest homepage on the internet started running a daily show. Yahoo launched The 9 on 10 July, hosted by Maria Sansone, and the premise was a countdown of the nine best things on the web that day, picked by producers and delivered to camera in a few minutes. It sat on yahoo.com and on Yahoo TV, which meant a distribution number nobody making web video in 2006 could get any other way.

The competition it was measured against was cable. Reviewers reached for Best Week Ever on VH1 or The Soup on E!, and the show was built in that register, fast and jokey and disposable by design. Time put it on the 50 coolest websites list that summer. In October the LA Times went to see it and wrote the thing up as Yahoo testing whether it could package other people's content and sell the package.

It came out of beta on 19 October 2006 and got a proper studio for it. The Awards episode ran that December. The Back 9 arrived on 3 February 2007, sorting the archive into categories so you could go looking rather than waiting for the daily list. Then Yahoo canceled it on 31 March 2008, and Liz Gannes wrote it up at NewTeeVee two days later.

~ the case file ~

~ the format ~

Next to the video player were nine numbered buttons, each labeled with the thing it pointed at. You could watch Sansone introduce all nine in order, or skip to number four and go straight out to whatever site number four was about. Viewers voted on their favorites and sent in things the producers had missed.

One of the nine slots most days was the Pepsi Tenth, which was the viewer submission and also the sponsorship. That was how a daily show got paid for in 2006: not with a preroll ad, but by selling a numbered position inside the editorial itself, and naming it after the sponsor on screen.

~ what yahoo was testing ~

Yahoo in 2006 had bought Flickr and del.icio.us and was trying to work out what it was for. The 9 was the version of that question aimed at the front page: take the day's internet, put a person in front of it, and see whether the audience that arrives at a portal by habit will sit still for something made rather than something listed.

They will, for a while, if it is free and short. What they will not do is make it a destination, and that was the problem. YouTube had been Google's for a year by the time the show was canceled, and a daily countdown show did not need Yahoo's homepage anymore. It needed a channel and a subscribe button, and both of those existed somewhere else.

~ the last one ~

Turkey had broadband by 2008 and I was on it, but the Yahoo homepage was not where anyone here started their day. That front page was a US habit, and The 9 was made entirely for the people who already had it open. Twenty months of a daily English-language show about American web culture went past without touching this country at all, and the only reason I can describe it now is that somebody archived the buttons.

Maria Sansone kept working in television afterward. The show has no proper archive of its own, which is the standard fate of daily video made inside a portal: no channel to inherit it, no feed that outlived the page it was embedded in.

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