X10 Wireless Technology

» see x10.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. was incorporated in 1999 in Kent, Washington, as the American arm of a company registered between Hong Kong and Bermuda. It sold small wireless video cameras, modules that switched lamps and appliances over the house wiring using the X10 protocol, and universal remotes built for Universal Electronics under the One-For-All brand from 1998. The website had gone up on 26 december 1996. None of that is why the name survives.

What survives is the advertisement. It was not a small panel floating over the page, it was an entire web page with its own address, opened underneath the window you were actually reading, so you found it later when you closed the thing you came for. The copy sold a tiny wireless camera that went almost anywhere, for fun or for security, demonstrated by a woman looking into the lens. Because the thing was a real page load rather than an overlay, it counted as a visit, and that is how a camera retailer ended up in the traffic charts next to Yahoo.

In may 2001 Jupiter Media Metrix counted 28.6 million unique visitors to x10.com and ranked it fifth on the web behind AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and Lycos. Nielsen/NetRatings counted 3.54 million for the same period, and the two firms spent the summer arguing about whether a window you did not ask for is a visit at all. The Seattle Times later put the peak at fourth, ahead of eBay. One analyst described the campaign as the most prevalent and intrusive sneak-attack advertising online marketing had produced. About two thirds of the people who got one closed the browser within twenty seconds.

The ad money followed the ad networks and in 2001 that meant the American commercial web, so I am not going to claim I remember the camera. I remember the condition it created. On a 56k line in turkey a second full page loading behind the one you asked for was not free, and you heard the modem working on it before you saw what it was. That was the whole flaw in the business, sitting in plain sight. X10 was not buying attention. It was spending your connection to take some.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ad ~

The pop-under existed because the pop-up had already worn out its welcome. A window in front of you gets closed in half a second and remembered as an irritation. A window behind you survives until the session ends, gets counted as a page view somewhere, and arrives with no context, which is why so many people ran into it and had no idea what they were looking at.

X10 bought this inventory across so much of the commercial web that for roughly two years the ad was closer to weather than to marketing. It made the company briefly enormous in every measurement that did not involve money, and it also made it one of the first companies the web organized against, because blocking X10 specifically was an achievable goal in a way that blocking advertising in general was not.

~ how it actually ended ~

The end came out of a courtroom rather than out of the ad market. A Superior Court jury in Santa Ana awarded $4.3 million to three brothers who said X10 had taken their proprietary technology and had not paid $564,000 in commissions. X10 filed for chapter 11 on 22 october 2003 with less than $50 million in unsecured liabilities, up to $10 million in assets, and fewer than 200 unsecured creditors. The company that had recently outranked eBay was in reorganization inside two years of its peak.

Then it did the unglamorous thing and kept going. For another decade X10 sold cameras and home automation kit to the much smaller audience that actually wanted them, without the ad buy that had made it famous. It filed for chapter 7 on 2 august 2013 with liabilities somewhere between one and ten million dollars, which is a very ordinary number for a company that had once been counted among the five most visited destinations on the internet.

~ the long tail ~

The format died before the company did. Every browser shipped a blocker within a few years, the ad networks stopped selling the inventory, and the pop-under became something you only encounter now on the far edges of the web where nothing has been updated since. What replaced it was worse in a quieter way, because the industry stopped trying to seize a whole window and went to work on the page you were already looking at.

The protocol outlived the company that shared its name. X10 home automation gear is still wired into houses built decades ago, switching lamps over the mains at a bit rate that would embarrass a modem, and it has nothing to do with any of this. Two entirely separate things called X10, and the one that got remembered is the advertising.

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