Ya.com

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

~ the obit ~

ya.com means "now" in spanish, which is a hard name to carry when your whole story is about the past. it was a spanish portal, a spanish access provider, spanish end to end. i was in Turkey on TTNet, so it was never going to be mine. i met the name the way i meet these, going through the closed portals of Europe one country at a time.

it opened in june 1999 inside Jazztel's internet arm, built by Martin Varsavsky with a crew of people who had left Terra, the big spanish portal, to go and build a rival. it worked fast. within a year ya.com was the second-largest portal in Spain, a real contender in a market that was only then getting online in numbers.

and then it started changing hands. in september 2000, near the height of the boom, Deutsche Telekom's T-Online bought the company. the germans had little use for a spanish content portal and every use for spanish broadband, so they slowly turned ya.com from a place you visited into an ADSL line you paid for, around four hundred thousand of them at the peak. the portal quietly went away. the pipe stayed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the actual end ~

in 2007 France Telecom's Orange bought the whole thing for three hundred and twenty million euros and ran it under its own name for a few more years. then in the autumn of 2012 it stopped selling ya.com broadband to anyone new, and that october it merged the remaining customers into plain Orange.

the brand simply stopped existing, thirteen years after it began, with no shutdown page and no goodbye. one month there was a company called ya.com, and the next there was only Orange. the address that had once meant "now" ended up pointing at nothing in particular.

~ the long tail ~

the man who started it did fine. Martin Varsavsky went on to grow Jazztel into a phone company and later to build FON, the shared-wifi outfit. he became one of the more visible spanish tech founders of the era, and ya.com was one line on a long resume for him. for the people who used it, it was an email address and a home page that one day belonged to Orange and then belonged to nobody. the portal era ended like that across Europe, not in a crash but in a merger, the local name painted over with the international one.

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