Urlesque

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

~ the obituary ~

Urlesque launched in April 2008 out of a gap somebody at AOL noticed. Stephen Lenz was editor-in-chief of Moviefone at the time, and AOL by then owned dozens of blogs covering movies, gadgets, games and parenting, and not one of them covered the internet. He pitched a site about the internet with Kelly Reeves, a programming manager he worked with, and got a yes.

The beat it invented is standard now and was strange then. Urlesque wrote about memes as news, ranked viral video, ran a year-end awards post called the Urlies and published a list of the hundred most iconic internet videos back when that was a claim somebody had to make first. The audience it was written for had arrived at the web through AOL's front page and did not read forums.

This is the part where I would say what I read on it, and I did not read it. In 2008 I was at university in Ankara on a TTNet line, and my internet about the internet was a Turkish forum where people argued about graphics cards and signed their posts with a hardware list. Urlesque was explaining Tumblr to Americans who had come in through a door that never existed here.

~ the case file ~

~ a day without cats ~

On 9 September 2009 Urlesque declared A Day Without Cats Online and got more than forty blogs to agree to publish nothing feline for twenty-four hours. It was a stunt about how much of the web's attention ran through a single animal, and it worked because Urlesque could call forty sites and have them pick up.

That was the asset the site had and its successors did not inherit. BuzzFeed built the same beat two years later on traffic mechanics rather than on a phone list, and by 2011 covering internet culture was a volume business.

~ what the merger did ~

AOL closed its $315 million purchase of the Huffington Post on 7 March 2011. Three days later it cut about 900 jobs, roughly 200 of them in the media division, and announced that some thirty brands would be integrated into other properties. Politics Daily went into HuffPost Politics and WalletPop went into DailyFinance. Urlesque went into HuffPost Comedy.

The last post went up on 27 April 2011, a video looking back at three years, and the official phrasing was that Urlesque was moving to a new home. The staff had already been cut in March, and HuffPost Comedy never ran an internet-culture desk after it.

~ the archive ~

The three years of writing did not make the move. The domain stopped serving the posts and the posts went with it, which was the ordinary AOL pattern for that reorganization. Download Squad and Cinematical lost their back catalogs to the same set of decisions.

What survives is what other people quoted. The Daily Dot went back in 2015 to write the site's history and had to reconstruct it from interviews, because the primary source was not there to read. A site whose whole subject was that the internet remembers everything is now readable only through the Internet Archive.

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