Wildfire Interactive

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

~ the eulogy ~

Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard started Wildfire in Redwood City in 2008 with a $250,000 grant from the Facebook Fund, which was Facebook paying outsiders to build things on top of Facebook. The product was a control panel for running promotions on a brand's page. Sweepstakes and coupon campaigns, the machinery behind every "like this page to enter" post that filled feeds in the early 2010s.

It worked fast. A $4 million Series A landed in May 2010 and another $10 million came in 2012. Virgin and Spotify were on the customer list, along with Cirque du Soleil. By then Wildfire had grown out from promotions into a full suite covering pages, ads, messages and monitoring across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+.

This is a product I could not have used even if I had wanted to, because you had to be a brand with a budget to get near it. Its output reached me constantly and anonymously anyway, as every page competition I scrolled past between 2010 and 2013 without once wondering who had built the entry form. Somebody had, and got a quarter of a billion dollars for it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the unraveling ~

Google announced the acquisition on 31 July 2012 and closed it on 15 August. The press put the price at $250 million, later accounts have written it as high as $450 million, and Google's public reasoning was about creating new ways for its clients to reach people across social services.

The problem was visible on day one and analysts said so at the time. Wildfire's entire business was helping brands do well on Facebook, and its new owner was in an open fight with Facebook. Google+ had launched in 2011 as a direct assault on exactly that. Buying the best tool for winning on a rival's platform, while building the product meant to replace that platform, only makes sense if one of those two commitments is theater.

~ how it landed ~

In April 2013 Google cut Wildfire's standalone plans to push customers up into the wider suite, which is usually the first observable sign that a product has stopped being a product. The technology started folding into DoubleClick that June, and in March 2014 Google told customers there would be no new features and no new clients.

The scramble was measurable. On the day of the announcement HootSuite reported twenty times its usual volume of inbound web inquiries worldwide, a spike it put at two thousand percent. Sprinklr said more than twenty Wildfire customers came looking for somewhere to land. The Drum covered the exodus on 18 March 2014 and listed the places people were going. Google kept the service breathing into 2015 and then stopped.

~ what replaced it ~

What Google actually bought was a customer list and an engineering team, and it kept the parts that fit DoubleClick. The product name went away without a farewell post, which for a nine-figure acquisition is its own kind of statement. Google's social ambitions did not outlast it by much either: Google+ closed to consumers in April 2019, seven years after the purchase it was supposed to justify.

The reading everybody took away in March 2014 was about platform dependency and it was the correct one. Wildfire existed because Facebook had a promotions API and no first-party tool of its own. Facebook never had to lift a finger to kill it. All that was required was for Wildfire's owner to become a competitor, and Google handled the rest internally.

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