Virb

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

~ the obituary ~

virb opened in march 2007 out of los angeles. the founder was brad smith, who had earlier built purevolume as a music-focused myspace alternative. virb was unborn media's second attempt at the same space, more social-network than purevolume had been, with the same emphasis on indie design and itunes integration. for a few months in 2007 some music blogs called it the possible myspace successor based on layout and feature parity. by the end of that year facebook had passed both myspace and virb in monthly active users, and the question of who succeeded myspace was answered without virb getting a vote.

media temple, the web hosting company, bought virb in june 2008. that was strange enough that it was reported as a curiosity at the time. media temple sold hosting; it did not run consumer social networks. the explanation was that media temple wanted a flagship consumer product. in august 2010 virb was relaunched as a do-it-yourself website builder, a clean break from the dead social network. the new pitch was a paid monthly subscription for a hosted portfolio site with reasonable templates. it lived in the same bracket as squarespace and cargo collective but at a smaller scale.

godaddy bought media temple in october 2014 and inherited virb as part of the package. for a couple of years the small skeleton crew kept it running. there was a techcrunch piece about virb spinning out, then quiet maintenance work, then a slow staff drain as godaddy reprioritized. in mid-june 2020, somewhere between the fourteenth and the twenty eighth of the month, the virb home page got rewritten to an end-of-life notice and the customer sites stopped loading. there had been no warning email. there had been no export window. the digital reader, a publishing blog whose author ran his site on virb, wrote about waking up to a dead site and a year's worth of content that he could only recover via the wayback machine.

i was not a virb user. by 2007 my professional site sat on a shared linux host with a custom php template, not a hosted page builder, and the demographic virb was aiming at was indie american designers and musicians rather than ankara engineers. i learned about virb properly only when i went looking for graves in the website-builder cluster around squarespace and cargo collective and noticed that the june 2020 shutdown matched the godaddy small-product-cleanup pattern almost exactly.

~ the case file ~

~ the original social network ~

the 2007 version of virb let you build a profile with a customizable color palette and embed your itunes top tracks on it. you had friends and comments and a feed. the visual design was cleaner than myspace because the customization options were constrained, which gave the average page a better look than the average myspace page in the same year. wired and techcrunch wrote profiles about the design. the actual signup numbers stayed in the hundreds of thousands while myspace held two hundred million.

by late 2007 facebook was past both of them on engagement. the social network race was over before virb had finished onboarding its alpha cohort. media temple bought the company at a discount in june 2008 with no clear plan for what to do with the active social product.

~ the website builder pivot ~

the august 2010 relaunch threw the social graph out. virb became a hosted page builder for portfolios. you got a small set of templates that mostly looked like art-school print layouts. a custom domain option came with the fifteen-dollars-a-month price tag. it was decent enough that some photographers and indie designers used it as their primary portfolio site for years. it competed against squarespace and cargo collective in the same niche but never won the brand fight.

media temple ran it as a small profitable product line until the godaddy acquisition. godaddy did not see a strategic future in a small portfolio builder competing against squarespace at scale. the maintenance window stretched to six years.

~ the june 2020 shutdown ~

the shutdown notice was not preceded by anything. there is no archived warning email. there is no migration tool. the godaddy community forum has a thread from late june 2020 from confused virb customers asking when the announcement happened and what their options were. the answer in both cases was nothing and none.

nate hoffelder at the digital reader wrote the most detailed customer-side account, including his rebuild plan and his recovery process using the wayback machine cache. that account exists because hoffelder was a working professional blogger with backup discipline. the typical virb customer was a photographer with a portfolio site and no offsite mirror, and the only export option was a manual screenshot pass through the wayback machine.

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