Wibiya

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

~ the obituary ~

For about four years there was a bar along the bottom of the internet. It docked itself to the lower edge of the browser window on somebody's blog and stayed there while you scrolled, with share buttons on one side and a search box on the other, plus whatever else the owner had switched on. A chat room with nobody in it. A small arcade game. Wibiya made most of those bars and gave them away for nothing.

It came out of Israel in 2008. Dror Ceder built the first version with Daniel Tal and Avi Smila, and the offer to publishers was as blunt as it sounds: you have no engineers, here is a strip of features you can install by pasting one line into your template. The install was the product. Every blog that took the free bar became another site loading Wibiya's code on every page view, which is a position worth more than a subscription fee.

By the spring of 2011 the bar was running on roughly 120,000 sites in front of about 200 million unique visitors, and Conduit bought the company for $45 million. Conduit was then one of the largest toolbar companies in the world, and buying the friendly bottom-of-page bar looked like a sensible extension of the unfriendly top-of-browser one. Growth continued after the deal. At the end there were about 150,000 publishers and 285 million uniques behind it.

I never installed one and I would not have. What I remember is the reader's half of the arrangement, which was learning to ignore a strip of buttons that covered the last line of every article on a phone. The bar asked you to share something you had not finished reading yet. That was true of the whole widget era and Wibiya was just the most visible version of it.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

Around 2010 a personal site was assembled out of other people's javascript. You wanted a comment system, a share row, a related-posts strip, a visitor counter, and none of it was worth writing yourself. Wibiya packaged that whole shopping list into one horizontal object with a settings panel, and it beat writing five separate embeds because it was one embed.

The trade underneath was never hidden, it was just never discussed. Free tools arrive in exchange for a permanent script tag on a page you own, pointed at a server you do not. Nobody minded in 2010. The bar was pleasant, the buttons worked, and the company had no obvious way to be evil yet.

~ the slide ~

The word toolbar went bad while Wibiya was inside a toolbar company. Conduit's core business was the search bar that arrived attached to a free download and changed your homepage, and by 2012 browsers and antivirus vendors were actively removing that category from people's machines. Chrome tightened extension policy. The revenue behind the whole industry stopped being defensible.

Conduit split itself up in 2013 and merged its Client Connect division into Perion in a deal announced that september. Wibiya went along in the paperwork as a business unit of something being unwound, which is the worst place a small product can find itself.

~ what really happened ~

The notice came on 7 october 2013, three weeks after the Perion deal. Conduit co-founder Ronen Shilo put it plainly: now that the toolbar business was no longer a focus, Wibiya as a business unit lacked a strategic role. The bar would keep working until the end of the year and then stop. The founders stayed on through the wind-down.

On 31 december 2013 the script stopped returning a bar. There was no error and no broken layout, because a widget that fails to load leaves nothing behind. Somewhere around 150,000 blogs quietly lost a feature and a good number of them still carry the dead embed in the template today, calling a domain that has nothing to say.

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