Tvidi

» see tvidi.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Two and a half million accounts were sitting on Tvidi's servers when the plug came out on 16 May 2016. Most of them belonged to people who had not yet turned sixteen, and a good number had been made by children who were six or seven when they registered and were finishing school by the time the site disappeared.

Tvidi opened on 18 September 2008 as a joint venture between RosBusinessConsulting, the Russian business news and internet holding usually written as RBC, and an Israeli company called Tweegee. Russian coverage at the time called it the first social network for children in the Russian-speaking internet, which it was, and the press treated the launch as a business story about a demographic nobody had monetized yet. The site aimed at ages six to fifteen. Children played browser games there, kept diaries, built little worlds, and mostly talked to each other.

It got big. By June 2013 Tvidi was pulling 2.1 million visitors a month, and a merger with children.kulichki.ru made it the largest children's property in Runet by audience. That is a real number for a segment where parents are the gatekeepers and advertisers are nervous, and it was still a business with no obvious way to make money from an audience that has none.

~ the case file ~

~ who it was for ~

The Russian kids-internet conversation in the late 2000s was mostly about danger. Tvidi's launch coincided with a stretch of Russian government interest in what children were doing online, and the site's selling point to parents was the walled garden: moderated, age-gated, a place where the other accounts were supposed to also belong to children.

Turkey's version of this arrived later and smaller, and the closest thing on this site is Tipeez, which ran from 2009 to 2018. I was twenty-four when Tvidi opened and had no reason to look at a Russian children's portal. The part I can read from the outside is the scale: 2.1 million a month is more people than most adult social products in the same market ever reached, and the whole thing was aimed at an audience that could not legally agree to a terms of service.

~ the sale ~

The trouble started around 2013, the same year the audience figure peaked, and it was the ordinary kind. Technical problems, maintenance that slipped, a product that stopped getting better. RBC itself was going through a rough decade.

In February 2016 the site went offline, and the explanation given was a sale and a migration to new owners. It came back in March. Two months later, on 16 May, it closed for good, with financial problems cited as the reason. The sale had bought it about ninety days.

~ the petition ~

There is a Change.org petition addressed to RosBusinessConsulting asking them to bring Tvidi back. It was started by users after the shutdown, which is to say by teenagers writing to a media holding company about a website they had joined in primary school. Nothing came of it, as nothing ever does, but it is the most honest artifact the site left behind.

The domain today serves a Russian domain registration and hosting lander, the kind that sells you the name you just typed. Tvidi.com, where the site kept its images and comics, is gone too. What survives is in the Internet Archive, where the last full capture of the homepage is dated 15 May 2016, one day before the end, and still shows the blue mascot and a row of user-drawn comic strips.

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