VizWoz

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

~ the obit ~

In March 2008 I was twenty-four and two years into TTNet broadband. VizWoz was aimed at British schoolchildren roughly half my age and never had a reason to cross the Channel, let alone the Bosphorus. This one I read about rather than remember.

What it was: a browser world for 11 to 14 year olds, where your avatar hovered rather than walked. The tagline was printed right into the logo, "hover and hang out with friends". It ran free with a VIP tier at GBP 2.95 a month, used a currency called the Viz Dolla, and policed itself with in-house moderators the company called VizCops. The launch date is unusually well pinned for a product this small: Friday 21 March 2008.

The company was VizWoz Ltd of Baskerville House, Birmingham, registered 06458745, spun out of School Stickers by its founder Daniel Laurence. The chairman was Doug Richard, who by then was known to most of Britain as one of the original investors on the first two series of Dragons' Den. Money came from IQ Capital and Bridges Ventures. For a tween world out of the West Midlands, that is a serious board.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The cleverest thing VizWoz built was the Viz Cinema, which opened on 14 May 2008 with licensed content from Paramount, Disney, Universal and Fox. Getting four studios to put film content inside a startup's Flash world was not a small piece of business development, and it worked: the cinema took more than 75,000 hits in its first three weeks.

The public number the company gave for the world as a whole was 335,000 total logins. That is logins, not registered users, and not concurrents. Nobody ever published a better figure, which in retrospect is the tell.

~ the cracks ~

VizWoz launched into the worst possible month. Bear Stearns collapsed the same week the world opened, and by the autumn the funding market for consumer startups in Britain had closed. A freemium world for children has a long, expensive runway: you need moderators on shift and licensing deals signed, and you need years of retention before the VIP subscriptions cover any of it. VizWoz had a little over two.

Administrators were appointed on 6 August 2010. The company was dissolved on 9 November 2011.

~ the day it died ~

Here is the part that makes VizWoz odd. The site kept running for two more years after its owner was in administration, under a separate company called Hubz Ltd, registration 07168126. The last capture of a live vizwoz.com is 9 September 2012. After that the archive holds nothing at all until a parking page appears on 18 September 2020, eight years later, the same month Hubz itself was dissolved.

There is a postscript that fools people. A WordPress blog appeared on the domain in 2023 announcing a comeback. Its author slug is literally /author/fiverr/, and no product ever shipped behind it. That is why the virtual worlds museum files VizWoz as dying in 2023, eleven years late. The world stopped answering in 2012.

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