Torget.se

» see torget.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

On 8 May 1996 the Swedish post office opened a website. Posten was a state monopoly whose whole business was moving parcels, and the logic behind Torget.se was simple enough to explain in one sentence: if Swedes started buying things online, somebody would have to carry the boxes. Build the marketplace, take the delivery fees. Icon Medialab did the construction work.

What Posten got instead was a chat room. Torget had forums and user-made homepages. It had a real editorial desk under Mattias Hansson, and it booked celebrities to sit and answer questions from readers live, which in 1996 was an event you told people about. Sweden went online early and went online hard, and Torget landed right in the middle of that with a state institution's budget behind it.

In 1996 I was twelve years old and still two years away from my first modem. The Swedish internet was already having a portal war between Torget and Telia's Passagen, arguing about which one owned the country's front page, while the question in my house was whether the phone bill could survive an evening of dialing. Different decade entirely, in practice.

Dagens Nyheter went back through the accounts in 2003 and got an official figure out of Posten: 904 million kronor. That made Torget the most expensive website Sweden has ever built, and it is still cited that way.

~ the record ~

~ what people actually did there ~

The shopping never took. Merchants were not set up to sell online and customers were not set up to buy, and in 1996 neither side had a card reader or a reason. The part that worked was everything Posten had added as decoration. People wrote in the forums and built pages, and they stayed for hours doing nothing that generated a parcel.

That was the trap. Torget was measurably popular and structurally broke. Swedish coverage at the time claimed it spent two years as the most visited site in Europe, which was a fine thing to put in a press release and no help at all on the revenue line.

~ the long slide ~

Posten gave up in 2001 and sold 92 percent of the shares to the financier Kjell Spångberg. He sold on to the consultancy Result in January 2004. EDSA Förlag bought it in 2006, and in December of that year the brand was switched off and sold to Lokaldelen i Sverige. Four owners in five years, each one smaller than the last.

~ the domain now ~

Torget.se resolves today. It is a Swedish classifieds and marketplace site with an analytics tag and a shortcut icon, run by people who bought a name with recognition left in it. Nothing on the page acknowledges that the address once cost the state nearly a billion kronor.

The people who worked there did fine. Hansson and Erik Hörnfeldt wrote a book about it, and the wider Torget and Passagen crowd went on to staff a good share of the Swedish internet industry for the next fifteen years. The most expensive website in the country's history turned out to be a training program.

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