Winfire

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

~ the goodbye ~

Winfire began as a piece of desktop software with no connection to broadband at all. The Winfire Browser Assistant, first released publicly in August 1999, was a free download that worked alongside your browser and was, in the company's own words, "small enough to fit into the Windows Start bar". It gave one-click access to what the site advertised as hundreds of personalized services, with a news ticker running through it and a search box. The January 2000 homepage is mostly a sweepstakes: "We're talkin' Maui Baby!", a trip for two, sponsored in part by Sundance Travel.com.

The hook was points. You earned them for clicking the shortcuts on the bar and simply for having the thing running, then redeemed them from an account page. The company signed more than a hundred content and distribution partners and offered a private-label version so other businesses could ship their own branded assistant. Chad Steelberg was chief executive and his brother Ryan ran the business side, the pair having already built AdForce, a web ad platform that sold to CMGI in 1999.

Then on 3 January 2000, a company called Broadband Digital Group launched FreeDSL: real high-speed DSL at home, no monthly charge, paid for entirely by advertising. The advertising needed somewhere to live, and the place it lived was a private-labeled Winfire Browser Assistant. Sixteen days later BDG bought Winfire outright, more than doubling its headcount to over ninety people, with Chad Steelberg taking the chairman and chief executive seats and Ryan Steelberg becoming president. The merged company eventually dropped the BDG name and simply called itself Winfire, Inc.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the toolbar was the business model ~

The logo on the 2000 site says it out loud: a green globe beside the word Winfire, with the line "provider of FreeDSL" sitting under it. By then the toolbar had become the meter. You did not pay for the line, so you had to keep the assistant installed and visible, and whatever it earned per user per month against what a DSL loop cost per user per month was the entire question facing the company.

That arithmetic was brutal in a way the free-dialup wave it imitated had not been. A dial-up ISP giving away hours had a marginal cost measured in modem ports; a DSL provider was paying a local telephone company a real monthly wholesale rate for a physical circuit, per house, forever. Winfire also depended on those same telephone companies to install the lines, and they prioritized their own paying customers, so subscribers waited months for service that was supposed to be the giveaway.

None of this reached Turkey. Residential ADSL arrived here through TTNet in the early 2000s as a paid product from the start, and there was never a window in which somebody offered a Turkish household a free broadband line in exchange for running an ad bar. The free-ISP idea did land, in the dial-up form, but the thing Winfire was actually selling stayed an American experiment.

~ commented out ~

In March 2001 Winfire, by then the DSL arm of a holding company that wanted to put its money into a communications software business called Octive, shut the network down and laid off most of its staff. A user posted the homepage notice to a forum on 18 March 2001: "Regretfully, the Winfire DSL network has been taken out of service. We are currently working to make it as easy as possible for Winfire DSL customers to transition to a new DSL provider."

The archive records the dismantling in a way I have not seen on another corpse. On 2 March the homepage HTML still contains every link the full site ever had, About DSL and Service Plans and Member Benefits and FreeDSL Demo and Support Center and Press Room and Careers, except that all of them have been wrapped in HTML comment markers. Three links survive uncommented. Two of them are the account login and the toolbar download; the third is Winfire E-mail. By the 30 March capture the first two are gone as well and the page is down to that single webmail link. The images loading beside it are named finalmark.gif and octivepowered.gif.

The Steelbergs were fine. They founded dMarc Broadcasting in Newport Beach the following year and sold it to Google in January 2006 for $102 million in cash.

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