Tilllate

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

~ the obituary ~

Tilllate started in 2000, built by students out of the ETH in Zurich, and the idea was almost crude in its simplicity: send your own photographers into the nightclubs, then have the pictures online before the hangover. Switzerland took to it at once. The site recorded 65 million page views in December 2005, and by 2008 it had 643,000 registered members in a country of under eight million people.

It went abroad in 2003, into four more countries with England and Germany among them. Tamedia then bought it in stages: 20 percent from 1 July 2007, 35 percent in May 2008, 86 percent in February 2009, and all of it by the start of 2010. No price was published for any of those steps.

The foreign business went separately in mid-2009, sold to Equitate of Glasgow, publisher of M8 magazine, which took the brand rights everywhere except Switzerland and Liechtenstein. That split is the likely reason the foreign domains ended up orphaned while the Swiss site carried on.

In December 2010 Tamedia announced the move into its 20 Minuten network for the following year. A 2016 relaunch turned the site into 20 Minuten Tilllate, a youth channel staffed by eight journalists. On 1 November 2018 the parent said the name would disappear completely, the content would move into 20minuten.ch at year end, and the team would go with it. The closure took effect at the end of that December.

~ the case file ~

~ the photographers ~

Tilllate employed its photographers. They worked the clubs on a schedule, and the next morning you went through a gallery of a few hundred strangers looking for yourself, then tagged the picture into your profile. Everything that came later inverted this: you bring the camera, and the platform only stores what you shot.

Turkey had no equivalent. The social layer here in those years was Hi5, which was everywhere from about 2005 to 2009 and which I never signed up for, and documenting a night out went through whoever in the group owned a camera. A commercial operation shooting the dance floor on a website's behalf was a Swiss and German-language thing, and I only know the shape of it because the company that ran it eventually died and left a paper trail.

~ the traffic that would not pay ~

At the 2016 relaunch one of the people running it put it plainly in an interview: despite the high traffic from the party photography, they had never managed to fully monetize the pages the pictures sat on. That is a striking admission about a product sixteen years old that the Swiss press still called the pioneer of its field. The staffing says the same thing from another angle. More than thirty people worked on the Swiss operation around 2008 and roughly ten were left by 2018, by which point the journalism had become the part worth paying for while the photographs stayed the reason anybody turned up at all.

~ what tamedia kept ~

The team moved into 20 Minuten under the same editor, the archive moved into 20minuten.ch, and the audience was already arriving through the parent's news sites, which is the reason Tamedia gave for retiring the name. The word itself went, with its three L's, after eighteen years as the thing an entire Swiss generation typed into a browser on a Sunday morning.

The domains scattered afterward. tilllate.com no longer resolves at all, and tilllate.de and tilllate.it are registrar holding pages with nobody behind them. The Spanish one is different. tilllate.es still answers in 2026, and what it serves is a single HTML file containing one image: a screenshot of the site's own last homepage, club galleries and all, dimmed down with a line written across it. Muchas gracias por estos años. Atentamente, Equipo Tilllate España. Thank you for these years, sincerely, the Tilllate Spain team. Nobody has taken it down, and the counters frozen into the corner of the picture still read 82,300 on Facebook and 16,600 on Twitter.

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