Webplanet

» see webplanet.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Every national internet grows its own trade press, and almost none of it is legible from outside. Mine was Donanimhaber and the forums around it, where the industry news arrived mixed in with hardware threads and people arguing about power supplies, and where I had a signature listing what was in my machine. Russia's version of that layer was a daily magazine called Webplanet, and it is the reason two other Russian sites exist.

Its own masthead gives the date without ambiguity: published since 5 December 2001, founder ZAO Webplaneta. Denis Kryuchkov started it and edited it for five years. It covered the Russian and the international internet industry daily, and its pitch to advertisers claimed to be read and written by senior and middle managers at most of the known Russian internet companies, which for a trade paper is the only claim that matters. It took the ROTOR++ award for best IT and telecom site in 2005.

The ownership went through three hands. Independent from 2001, bought outright by an agency called Agency of Mass Communications in early 2006, then passed to the hosting company Masterhost in 2008 as part of the Activist group. The newsroom moved into Masterhost's building on Ostapovsky Proezd and stayed there until the end. Its audience, by the figures on its own rate card, was 257,600 unique visitors a month with 194,800 of them in Russia, and a weekly reach of ninety thousand impressions. Nobody else ever published numbers for it.

Lenta's obituary is the best description of what it had turned into by the end, and it is not flattering in the way an obituary usually is. In its last years it was not really a news outlet, Alexander Amzin wrote, but a creative gang, a collective of punks. He also called it a cult publication and a symbol of the nineties generation, which is a thing you can only be for so long before somebody checks the accounts.

~ the case file ~

~ who walked out of it ~

Kryuchkov went in spring 2006 and started Habrahabr, which became the technical publication for the whole Russian-speaking industry and is still that. His deputy editor Yuri Sinodov went in 2007 and started Roem.ru, which became the industry gossip and business outlet and is also still that. Neither of them left to escape a dying thing; both left while Webplanet was healthy, having worked out what the next format was going to be.

Alexey Andreev took over as editor in June 2006 after a brief interregnum and held it until the last day. The final masthead is worth reading as a list of who was in that room: Masha Formanyuk as deputy, three news editors, and columnists including Anton Nosik, Leonid Delitsyn and Pavel Protasov. Seventy seven bylined authors across ten years, all of them still listed on a page that nobody has edited since 2011.

~ the last day ~

Leonid Filatov, the Masterhost shareholder who had argued for buying Webplanet, sold his stake to his partner Yevgeny Benevolensky on 2 November 2011. Two weeks later the new shareholders stopped the editorial operation. There was no announcement at all. The news broke on 19 November when Roem published a post titled with a question mark, and the staff turned up in its comments to confirm it.

The last dated stories are all from 17 November: a VKontakte test, a Google Music item, and Andreev's own column about a parasite that manipulates cats. A former editor, Zlata Nikolaeva, made the joke that Webplanet was closed because its authors had uncovered the conspiracy of cats. Andreev told Roem on the 21st that they had been told it was only being suspended for now, and that was it. One interview dated 25 November was pushed out afterwards, never indexed in the news list, probably written before the lights went off.

No reason was ever stated officially. Everyone involved gave the same unofficial one. Lenta called it hopelessly unprofitable; Sinodov's version was that if a publication does not earn enough to cover its own newsroom, the tap can be turned off. Asked whether it could be revived, Kryuchkov said it would need a one-man orchestra, and there was not one available.

~ still served ~

Webplanet has never actually gone offline. Plain HTTP to webplanet.ru returns 200 and hands over the front page as it stood in the middle of November 2011, all forty nine kilobytes of it, still calling out to Masterhost's old ad server in the markup. Only HTTPS fails, which is the only reason it looks dead from a script. The whois record shows Masterhost's nameservers and a registration paid through 2027.

So the hosting company that switched off the newsroom has kept the corpse on a shelf for fifteen years and keeps renewing the lease. You can still read the rate card. You can still read the conspiracy of cats. What you cannot do is find anything dated after the day the editors were told to look for other work.

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