Yahoo! Internet Life

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

~ the obit ~

yahoo internet life was a print magazine about the internet, published by ziff davis in new york between 1995 and 2002. i was online for the whole run of it but it was a us product, not really meant to cross the atlantic, and i only ever saw scans of pages years later. the bookmark of the late nineties for me was the donanimhaber forum and the chip dergisi cd compilations that came glued to the cover. that was the turkish version of what yil was, except chip lived another twenty years.

the magazine started as a single zd internet life issue in fall 1995. ziff davis licensed the yahoo name in spring 1996 and the masthead changed. barry golson, former executive editor at playboy and at tv guide, was the founding editor. the writing was a strange mix, half service journalism for people who did not know what a url was, half cultural criticism for people who already knew. roger ebert had a regular column about movies and the internet. by 1999 the paid circulation was over a million.

the best of the web issues are the artifacts that survive best on the internet archive, page after page of color screenshots of websites with star ratings beside them, in a layout that looks like a tv guide for hyperlinks. the magazine had the same problem as every other late-nineties web directory. by the time the print issue reached the newsstand half the links were already broken or had moved. by may 2002 ad pages were down 52 percent year over year. ziff davis announced the closure in july 2002 and the last issue shipped that august.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

yil was the dot-com era's mass-market field guide to the internet, written for people who had aol or compuserve and did not yet have a permanent bookmark folder. the recurring tentpole was the annual best of the web list, hundreds of sites picked across categories like news, shopping, music, kids, with a print page per category and a star rating beside each url. the magazine was where you found out that the onion existed and that geocities had a community for your specific hobby. it taught a million people how to type urls into browsers.

~ who wrote it ~

barry golson was the founding editor, former playboy executive editor and former tv guide executive editor. the staff list later included angela gunn, lisa holzer, ben greenman, larry smith, bilge ebiri. roger ebert wrote a regular column called the bigger picture about movies and the internet. michael wolff did media criticism. the writing was better than it needed to be for a brand-licensed product about a thing changing too fast for a print monthly to cover, which is part of what made the closing read like a small obituary in 2002.

~ the postmortem ~

the cause of death is in the postmortem itself. ad pages were down 52 percent in the year to may 2002. the audience that had been the natural buyer of a magazine about how to use the internet did not need a magazine about how to use the internet by 2002, because they had been using it for five years and were happy to ask google. ziff davis decided in july that the brand was not going to recover and the august issue would be the last. the yil.com archive lived for a few years inside ziff davis and is now mostly preserved on the internet archive.

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