Wupload

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

~ the goodbye ~

Wupload sold a simple promise to the people filling it: upload something popular and get paid. Forty dollars for every thousand downloads, and nobody at the site asked what the file was. That reward money is what made the cyberlocker era move so fast around 2011. It is also the reason every one of these sites was a lawsuit waiting to happen.

The service launched in 2011 and grew the way its whole cohort grew, on affiliate payouts and premium accounts that stripped out the waiting timers on free downloads. Then in November 2011 it quietly killed the affiliate program. That was the first flinch, the sign that the people running it had started reading the same room everyone else was reading.

On 19 January 2012 US prosecutors seized Megaupload and charged Kim Dotcom. Within weeks a Paramount executive named Wupload on a short list of rogue cyberlockers that ought to be shut next, and by April the site had stopped being a file host at all. It kept only the files you had personally uploaded, which is another way of saying it kept nothing anyone came for.

From Ankara the cyberlocker era was a link in a forum post that either worked or gave you an error page. For a stretch of 2011 those links mostly worked, and premium accounts got passed around like currency. After that winter the links mostly gave you the error page, and Wupload was one of the first to go quiet.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

What separated Wupload from an ordinary storage locker was that it treated uploaders as a salesforce. The payout scaled with popularity, so the incentive was always to upload the file the most people wanted, which in practice meant the file the most people were not supposed to have. It worked beautifully until the exact moment it became a liability.

~ the postmortem ~

Wupload did not die in a courtroom. It read the Megaupload arrest, did the math on where the enforcement was heading, and walked away from its own business model before anyone made it. The reward program went first. The sharing and the site followed within months. It was less a shutdown than a company backing out of a room with its hands up.

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