Tipeez

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

~ the obituary ~

Tipeez opened on 15 December 2009 and was, by every Turkish account of it, the first web portal in this country designed from the start for children and teenagers rather than adapted down to them. Everything on it was in Turkish. That sounds small and it was not, because the alternative for a ten year old in 2009 was an English-language site with a Turkish forum bolted onto the side.

It was not homegrown, exactly. Tipeez was the local edition of Tweegee, a children's network run out of Israel that licensed the same platform into a long list of markets including Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Italy and the Emirates. Haymi Behar ran the Turkish operation. The model was franchise-shaped: one virtual world, many national doors into it.

Turkish media money arrived fast. Doğan Yayın Holding took a stake in 2010, which is how Tipeez ended up building a Hürriyet children's club minisite and a virtual newsroom where kids played at being reporters. Doğan sold its entire holding in Tweegee on 25 June 2013, and by then the growth curve had already done most of what it was going to do.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

The membership numbers are the part worth writing down. 552,000 in 2010, then past a million during 2011. By 15 December 2017 the count stood at 2,293,531 registered accounts. For a country of that size, on a product aimed at one narrow age band, those are serious figures, and they were reached without any of the app-store mechanics that would drive the same thing today.

What kept them there was Tipeez Dünyası, the virtual world, plus a play economy running on a currency called Tippuan. There were forums, games, news channels written for children, and a tool for making your own comics. The comic maker is the detail that dates it most precisely: a decade before every child had a video editor in their pocket, the creative outlet a site could offer was panels and speech bubbles.

~ what got buried with it ~

The decline reads as ordinary. From 2017 the traffic fell away, the audience having moved to phones and to platforms with no age bracket at all. During 2018 Tipeez İnternet Hizmetleri stepped back from the site, and whole sections of it simply stopped functioning while the front page stayed up. It closed on 21 December 2018, six days after its ninth birthday, and it was the last Tweegee property still running anywhere in the world.

I was twenty-five when Tipeez opened and thirty-four when it closed, which puts me outside its audience by about a decade on both ends. But it is worth marking, because my generation's version of this had no version. We had internet cafes and Counter-Strike by the hour, and nothing at all that was built for us in our own language with an account attached to it. The kids who got Tipeez had a Turkish internet made deliberately for them, and then it was taken away without anyone writing much of anything down.

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