The Superficial

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

~ the goodbye ~

American celebrity gossip only works if you already know who the people are. That is the whole load-bearing assumption, that a paparazzi photograph of an actress leaving a restaurant on a Tuesday means something to you before anybody writes a caption. From Ankara it meant nothing. I could read every word on the page and get none of the joke, because the joke was ninety percent context I did not have and had no way to acquire.

The Superficial launched on 23 May 2004, made by Karl Wang under a company called Anticlown Media, and it carried the tagline "Because You're Ugly" on every page for its entire life. The format was a photo and a paragraph, and the paragraph was cruel in a specific way that its imitators kept failing to copy. Mike Redmond took over as head writer in August 2007 and stayed nearly ten years, working alongside a photo editor known to readers only as Photo Boy.

It was big. In June 2012 it sat at 1,099 in the American Alexa ranking, which for a site with two people writing it is an absurd number. Buzz Media bought it in 2009 and later renamed itself SpinMedia. In December 2016 SpinMedia sold it to CPX Interactive in what Redmond has since described as a fire sale, bundled with Celebuzz and The Frisky. The people who made the thing owned none of it, which is the ordinary arrangement and also the reason the ending went the way it did.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it read ~

The reason it survived a decade of competitors is that it was written, not aggregated. A gossip blog in 2006 could be assembled by a person with a scraper and a caption template, and most of them were. The Superficial had a voice that turned up every day and stayed recognizable across owners, which is the only durable asset a site like that can build.

It was also genuinely nasty, and worth being honest about that rather than sanding it down. The bit was that celebrity is a con and the reader is being had. That premise ages in complicated ways, and some of what ran in 2008 would not run now. It was still the sharpest writing in a category that mostly did not have any.

~ the decline ~

CPX Interactive laid out its plan on a conference call on 17 March 2017: redesign the homepage into a thumbnail grid and start running explicit photo galleries syndicated from another property. Google had already been flagging the site's galleries as adult content, which cut what advertisers would pay, and the response was to go further in that direction rather than back out of it. Redmond resigned the following Monday, 20 March. The photo editor gave two weeks and was gone by the end of the month.

What followed was a writer posting under the name Randy Cappuccino, whose identity the previous staff never established. That lasted until the first days of January 2018. The final post went up on 3 January and nothing came after it.

~ what got buried with it ~

On 2 February 2018 the homepage began redirecting to Celebuzz, which is the normal way a dead property gets folded into a live one. The part worth recording came on 26 April, when every remaining URL on the domain was pointed at Celebuzz as well. Thirteen years of posts did not get a farewell notice or an archive page. They stopped existing at their own addresses, which for anything written on the web is the same as being deleted with extra steps.

That is the ending most ad-funded writing on the internet actually gets, and it is why it rarely gets a proper obituary. Nobody announces a redirect. Today thesuperficial.com does not even reach Celebuzz any more. The domain has been through resale and now bounces through a chain of ad landing pages in another language entirely, which is the state a name ends up in once nobody is paying to keep it meaning anything.

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