WinWin

» see winwin.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Classifieds are the most local thing on the internet. A used car or a two-room apartment does not travel, and means nothing at all to somebody in another country. An Israeli board was never going to reach me in Ankara, and there is no version of my life where it would have. What makes this one worth a grave is the thing behind it, which is a newspaper watching its own back pages walk out the door and trying to follow them.

The back pages in question belonged to Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest paper in Israel, and the classifieds in them were a real business. On 4 March 2007 the group launched WinWin as the replacement, with what the announcement called an investment of millions of shekels. Ads placed in the printed section appeared on WinWin free of charge at the same time, which is how you move a market you already own without frightening the people paying for it.

Posting was free. The board carried cars and real estate, private and commercial, inside Israel and outside it, then second-hand goods and animals underneath that. Two things made it more than a list. The first was the Levi Yitzhak price guides, the valuations Israel's insurance and appraisal trade treats as authoritative, wired directly into the car and apartment sections so a listing sat next to what the thing was actually worth. The second was stranger.

For the new-apartment section, Yedioth sent eighty photographers out to shoot nearly every building and street in the country. That fed a service called YMap, which put the real photograph of the real facade behind the listing. This was early 2007. Google Street View did not launch anywhere until that May and would not cover Israel for years afterward. A newspaper's classifieds department drove the country and photographed it by hand, so that people selling apartments would have somewhere to sell them.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the competitor in its own url ~

Yad2 was the incumbent, and it stayed the incumbent. The most telling artifact of that fight showed up within a month of launch. WinWin was serving its second-hand board from the path winwin.co.il/yad2, and because Google shows the URL, the brand name printed under WinWin's own search ads and organic listings was its competitor's. An Israeli SEO writer noticed it on 31 March 2007 and asked in print why a site would choose to display a rival's name to its own visitors.

The subdirectory was gone within hours of that post. The habit was not: the page titles kept carrying "yad2" as a keyword for years afterward. It is the clearest possible statement of who was winning, made by the losing side, in its own address bar.

~ the cracks ~

The site kept building anyway. December 2013 brought a rebuilt new-car section with reviews across every manufacturer on the market. March 2014 added credit card payment so you could buy a second-hand item from a private seller without meeting them in a parking lot. Then on 12 October 2020 the categories started disappearing. Everything that was not real estate was pulled down and could no longer be bought at all, leaving the site as an apartment board and nothing else. By then the title on its own pages had stopped saying WinWin and started saying ynet Real Estate. The name was finished in November.

The hostname is still pointed somewhere. Ask for it today and you get a TLS certificate that does not match the name, and behind that a 502 Bad Gateway carrying a meta refresh set to two seconds, so the error page reloads itself forever waiting for a backend that was switched off six years ago.

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