Ticker.tv

» see ticker.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ticker.tv wanted to be the video layer of the stock market. It opened in December 2014 on the premise that the people who actually trade have things to say to each other, and that the format for saying them should be a channel you own rather than a post on a message board. Anybody could create one. You could upload a recording or broadcast live, and the subject matter stayed inside a narrow band of equities and options.

The numbers it reported are small and oddly precise. More than a hundred channels created since launch, and over three thousand videos behind them, adding up to around thirty-five thousand hours viewed. That is a real audience by the standards of a one-year-old site and nowhere near enough to run a video platform on, since video is the most expensive thing a small company can decide to host.

The address on its own listing is 119 West 72nd Street in Manhattan, a block from Central Park, which is a long way from Wall Street in both directions. The phone number is a 917 cell. Nothing about the public record suggests a large operation behind it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The years around it were full of this bet. Blip had already been eaten and Vessel was about to launch on a subscription model, with Vidme taking the general-purpose version of the same idea into the ground over the two years that followed. Ticker.tv's variation was vertical: not video for everyone, but video for one professional audience that already had money and already spent its day watching screens.

On paper that is the better business, because a trader is worth more to an advertiser than a teenager is. In practice the vertical video network keeps failing for the same reason, which is that the audience is small enough to be reachable by cheaper formats. Everything Ticker.tv's channels were doing could be done in a chat room or a webinar at a fraction of the bandwidth bill.

~ the funny part ~

What survives of it is a sitemap. Archive Team's record of the shutdown points at ticker.tv/sitemap.php, which listed the videos and the users, and at an Amazon S3 bucket named tickertv-archives that held the media. Somebody crawled both before 16 October 2015 and the WARC files went into the Internet Archive, so a financial video network that almost nobody remembers is better preserved than plenty of services with a thousand times its traffic.

The domain is still registered and still answers. What it serves now is a consent banner and nothing else, a page whose entire visible content is the phrase "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information", sitting on top of an empty document with no links in it at all. A site built so that traders could talk to each other ended as a cookie notice with no page behind it.

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