Triond

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

~ the last words ~

Triond was founded in June 2006 by Shahar Solomianik and Udi Oz, with Oren Solomianik alongside them, and it ran out of Tel Aviv. The idea it was built on is easy to describe and, for about three years, it worked. Most people writing on the internet in 2006 had a blog nobody read. Triond left the blog alone and made a different offer: send the article to us, we decide which of our thirty websites it belongs on, we publish it there next to real traffic, and you keep half of whatever the ads earn.

Giza Venture Capital put $1.5 million in. By April 2009 the network was drawing three million unique visitors a month across its properties and more than a hundred thousand people had registered as writers. Those two numbers sitting next to each other are the whole story: three million visits divided across a hundred thousand contributors is not a living, it is a few dollars a month, and everyone involved knew it. People wrote anyway, because a few dollars was more than a personal blog paid and because seeing your name on a site with an audience felt like being published.

What killed the model was Google. The Panda update in 2011 was aimed squarely at sites that produced enormous volumes of thin articles on high-traffic topics, and Triond's entire inventory was that by construction. Traffic across the network fell, the payouts fell with it, and the moderation that had never been generous got worse. By 2015 the company had closed its own writer forum rather than police it.

~ the record ~

~ the network ~

The part most people missed is that Triond was not a website you visited. It was thirty of them, with names like Quazen and Socyberty, each dressed as an independent magazine about pets or cars. If you ran a search in 2009 and landed on one of those pages, nothing on it told you that the article had been submitted to a company in Israel and dealt out to whichever brand its editors thought fit best.

That is how most of us met it, without knowing we had. The search results of that era were full of these things, and the sites that produced them were invisible by design. Learning the name Triond usually happened long afterward, in a forum thread full of people asking where their articles went.

~ what the writers lost ~

Revenue share writing has always had one structural trap: your portfolio lives on somebody else's server. Triond writers spent years building article counts that existed nowhere else, because the terms discouraged posting the same piece elsewhere and because uploading a text file to a site felt like storage. When the site went, the archive went with it.

There was no email and no thirty day export window. Writers found out the way you find out anything has been unplugged, by going to the address and getting nothing back.

~ the vanishing ~

The Internet Archive brackets the ending tightly enough to be sure of the year and no tighter. The full Triond homepage, about seven kilobytes of dashboard and featured articles, is captured normally on 9 February 2016. The next capture of the same address is 22 September 2016 and it is four hundred and sixty five bytes: a GoDaddy parking iframe. Somewhere in those seven months the company let the site go.

Ten years on, triond.com still answers, with a two-line page whose only job is to bounce you to a lander. The domain is worth more as an expired name with backlinks than the publishing business ever was in its last years, which is a fair summary of what happened to the whole content farm decade.

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