UzmanTV

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

~ the goodbye ~

For most of a decade, typing a plain practical question into Google in Turkish put a video near the top of the results, and the video was a person in a studio chair answering it in about ninety seconds. How to descale a kettle. What to do about a tick bite. The clips all lived on the same site and there were roughly sixty-five thousand of them.

Ersan Ozer built UzmanTV in six months and opened it in June 2007. The premise sat one step away from the video sites of that moment: instead of anybody uploading anything, the answer came from somebody with a reason to be trusted with the question. The site went and found the doctors and the lawyers itself, then cut each answer down to the length of a question rather than the length of a lecture.

That was an expensive way to build a video library and it took four and a half years to pay for itself. Webrazzi's account of the company has the detail that makes the whole thing legible: the first real advertising money arrived from television agencies, not from digital planners, because in 2009 the format looked to a media buyer like television and not like the internet. Digital agencies did not start buying video until 2010.

I never had an account here and never uploaded anything, and that was not how most people met this site. By 2007 I was on TTNet broadband and searching in Turkish for anything practical, and UzmanTV arrived the way a road sign arrives, without being chosen. Ten years of Turkish how-to queries went through a company almost nobody discussed. Enormous reach with no brand loyalty under it, because the visit was always incidental to the question.

~ the chronicle ~

~ sixty-five thousand answers ~

The number that gets repeated is about sixty-five thousand videos from close to two thousand experts, and the shape of that catalog matters more than the size. Almost none of it was topical. A video about a fever in a child, or about what a lawyer needs from you before a hearing, does not go stale in the way a news clip does, so the library kept earning search traffic years after each clip was shot. A site with that property does not need to keep spending to stay in the results.

The company pushed at the edges of it in both directions. UzmanTV Rehber was a directory layer for finding more question-and-answer pairs and UzmanTV Akademi sold longer expert material, and there was an iPhone application early enough that having one was still worth a headline. In December 2009 Webrazzi ran a piece about the company not intending to stop at the internet, which in Turkey at that point meant television.

~ the year it started making money ~

November 2011 is the date in the story, because that is the month UzmanTV turned a profit for the first time, four and a half years after opening. December doubled November. The company had spent something in the region of five to six million through its first three years against almost no revenue, which is the part of a Turkish startup story from that era that usually ends differently.

Turkish internet companies of the 2007 window mostly died of running out of money, got folded into a portal, or spent a decade as somebody's loss-making prestige asset. This one reached the other side and then kept running for another eleven years, which makes the ending stranger rather than more explicable. Nothing in the public record says the site was failing when it stopped.

~ the page that is still waiting ~

The archive brackets the ending inside a week. On 21 October 2022 the front page was still the full site, about eleven and a half kilobytes of markup with the login box and the subject list still in it. On 28 October the same address served two kilobytes: the UzmanTV logo drawn as an inline SVG, centered on white, and one line of text under it reading Kisa Bir Sure Sonra Yeniden Bulusmak Uzere. See you again in a short while.

That page stayed up unchanged for twenty-six months, still promising the short while. The last capture of it is 12 January 2025, and from 3 February 2025 the address has returned a Cloudflare 530, which is what you get when the name still points somewhere and nothing behind it is answering. The videos are not gone, because the YouTube channel survived the site and still holds the catalog, so the answers outlived the place that organized them. What died was the index, which was the only part that was ever really the product.

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