Todito.com

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

~ the obituary ~

The first time I heard the name Todito was while reading about what Mexico used before broadband, which is roughly two decades after it mattered. This is a reconstruction rather than a memory. What pulled me in is that the interesting half of the company was not the web portal at all, it was a payment method, and payment methods are the part of internet history that nobody writes down.

Todito.com went up in 1999, built by Universidad CNCI, a private university in Monterrey, as an advertising-funded portal. TV Azteca bought half of it in february 2000, which is the moment it stopped being a university project and became a broadcaster's internet strategy. The other half stayed with CNCI. Tim Parsa, who had run new media at TV Azteca, took it over.

What it offered was the standard portal inventory of the period, done properly: free email with fifty megabytes per account, auctions, a store, chat, message boards, and news. By the end of 2004 it was drawing 1.8 million visits a day from two million active users. Revenue that year was around twelve million dollars, which put it in the front rank of Spanish-language sites without it ever being known outside Mexico.

~ the case file ~

~ the card ~

The Todito Card launched about a year after TV Azteca came in. It was prepaid internet access sold as a physical card at whatever shop was nearest, and it existed because signing a monthly contract with a Mexican phone company in 2001 required a bank relationship that most households did not have. You bought hours and you dialed in, and nobody ran a credit check on anybody.

Prepaid dial-up cards were sold in Turkey as well, so the shape is familiar to me even if this particular one is not. What distinguishes the Mexican version is scale and consequence. By the end of 2004 the card had over half a million active users and 8.8 million dollars of annual revenue on its own, and it had become the country's leading prepaid internet product. The portal was the front; the card was the business.

~ the funny part ~

On 8 june 2005 TV Azteca announced it was taking full control of Todito.com from CNCI and merging it into tvazteca.com under a new internet subsidiary. In the same split, CNCI kept the Todito Card outright. The broadcaster took the website and the university took the payments business, and each side walked away convinced it had picked the valuable half.

The website did not survive the merge by long and was gone by 2007, absorbed into a broadcaster's own site the way most portal acquisitions end. The card kept trading under the Todito name for years afterward, which means the brand outlived the site it was named after. Two decades on, prepaid access schemes are still being reinvented in Mexico for the same reason they worked the first time, and the portal that spawned this one is not remembered anywhere outside Spanish-language nostalgia posts.

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