webmiles

» see webmiles.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Loretta Würtenberger founded webmiles in Munich on 23 April 1999, together with Patrick Boos and Dominik von Ribbentrop. The idea had the clean logic that 1999 rewarded: airlines and supermarkets had been issuing their own private currencies for decades while the web had none, so somebody ought to mint one you earned by shopping online and spent on rewards. Wellington Partners put up most of the money. By November, seven months in, there were branches in Britain, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden, and the headcount was around a hundred. Goldman Sachs came in with roughly ten million marks early in 2000.

On 18 October 2000 the Bertelsmann Service Group, which belonged to arvato, bought seventy percent. What followed was the standard sequence for a startup that gets bought by a patient industrial owner in the middle of a crash. Würtenberger left on 15 December. Sweden was shut before the year was out, then nearly every other foreign market except France, although somebody still opened a Swiss branch in March 2001. Boos and von Ribbentrop went in the autumn of 2001, after the cost and headcount cuts their new majority shareholder required.

And then webmiles did something most dot-com-era companies never got the chance to do, which is become unexciting. It converted from an AG to a GmbH in May 2002 and made its first profit in February 2003. That August it absorbed a Bertelsmann sibling called Emil Deutschland and opened in Austria. In November 2008 it was renamed Arvato Online Services. In 2013 somebody decided the old name was worth more and renamed it back.

~ the dossier ~

~ the currency ~

A mile was earned by going to a shop through webmiles instead of going there directly, and the whole business ran on the gap between what a retailer would pay for that referral and what a mile cost to redeem. Its competition was Payback, and eventually DeutschlandCard, which belonged to the same arvato that owned webmiles. Cashback systems then came along and paid people actual money instead of catalog goods.

None of this ever came near me. Loyalty points were a national layer of the web rather than a global one, bound to the retailers of one country and the postal address you had to give them, and Turkey ran its own with no reference whatsoever to Munich. The web promised to flatten everything, and then it turned out that the part of the web made of coupons stayed exactly as local as coupons had always been.

~ the wind-down ~

On 23 May 2016 a newsletter went out telling members that from 1 June they could no longer collect miles. Existing balances were convertible into DeutschlandCard points at three to one, which is the rate at which a company tells you what it thinks your savings were worth. The legal entity lasted until 31 December 2019, when it was folded into arvato eCommerce GmbH, long after the last mile had been issued.

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