Yahoo Bix

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

~ the goodbye ~

bix was the kind of yahoo property i kept hearing about in techcrunch sidebars in 2007 without ever clicking through. the site was a contest platform. you uploaded a video of yourself singing into a webcam or a photo of your dog. then the public voted, and at the end of a week somebody won a small cash prize or an extra (tv series) cameo. by 2007 the daily vote count was crossing a million.

the company itself was a small one. twelve people in sunnyvale, california, funded by trinity ventures with sutter hill. stewart bonn ran it. echeyde cubillo and jeff cordova filled out the founding team alongside leonard and mike speiser. the public beta opened in july 2006. yahoo bought the whole thing four months later, on november 16 2006, with no public price tag. later filings put the acquisition somewhere around six million dollars per industry reporting.

i was twenty-two in turkey in 2006 on a dorm-room ttnet line, finishing engineering coursework with msn messenger open in the corner. the youtube version of the karaoke contest already lived on youtube itself by then. bix needed you to leave youtube and trust a yahoo-stamped contest engine instead, which by 2007 was a hard ask outside the small slice of the us internet that still ran every social interaction through yahoo properties.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

bix at the layer the users saw was a contest site. you uploaded a clip, you submitted it to a theme like "best dog trick" or "sing along to this billboard track", and the rest of the site ranked your entry by votes. the site held three patents on the way contests were structured. the patents survived the shutdown and got assigned to yahoo, which spent the next decade citing them in unrelated filings.

on the business side bix carried sponsored contests for capitol records and electronic arts and the cable show extra. brands paid bix to host the contest, the public voted, the winner got a token prize, and the brand got a few weeks of impressions on a yahoo-affiliated property. in those days. the site competed with singshot for the karaoke piece and with worth1000 for the photoshop-contest piece. neither competitor outlasted bix by much.

~ how it ended ~

carol bartz took over as yahoo ceo in january 2009 with a mandate to cut dead weight. the april 2009 layoff round took out yahoo briefcase and geocities alongside a handful of internal teams. bix got the june 30 2009 closure notice in a quiet blog post that pointed users to no replacement and offered no migration path. for some reason, the team was small enough that the wind-down went unnoticed outside the techcrunch beat reporters who had covered the launch three years earlier.

the bix domain went idle for years afterward. by 2014 it had been parked and resold for unrelated branding. the patents stayed with yahoo through the verizon acquisition and into the apollo era, where they sit in the property catalog as dead ip with nobody left who remembers what the product looked like at the layer the user saw.

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