YiGG

» see yigg.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Enrico Kern and Christian Volmering launched it on 1 January 2006, replacing a five year old news site of their own called Th!nkNerd. They did not bother inventing a name. The thing was Digg, in German, at digg.de, and they called it Digg until lawyers explained why that would not continue. YiGG is what you get when you have already printed the logo.

The mechanics were copied faithfully. Users submitted links, other users voted, the front page reordered itself, and a comment thread hung off every item. Michael Reuter and Lawrence Nell joined in early 2007. Roland Metzger, who had founded the job board Jobpilot, put money in the same year. By September 2008 there were around 30,000 registered accounts, which for a German language social news site in that period was a working community.

It was also the wrong shape for the market it was in. German web readers of that era were on forums and on blogs with comment sections, and the ones who wanted an aggregator largely went to the English one. YiGG spent eight years being the biggest German social news site and never once being large.

~ the dossier ~

~ the relaunch that cost a million ~

Meedia's account puts the collapse in mid 2008, not at the end of 2009 where most people place it. A redesign went out that reportedly cost well over a million euros, and within two months the Munich company had lost close to two thirds of its traffic. Reuter, by then chief executive, attributed the fall to reduced visibility in the Google index, which is the polite way of saying the new URLs threw away every ranking the old ones had earned.

The site never got the traffic back. IVW's audited figures for May 2010 record 162,760 unique users producing 505,142 page impressions in the month, which is a respectable regional blog and not a social news network with a front page worth fighting over.

~ Bald Online ~

In early March 2014 the operators shut it down for lack of success and pulled the site off the network. The archive shows the ordinary German front page, headline "Die besten Nachrichten von heute", still serving in early May 2014 at around seven and a half kilobytes. By 30 June it is 943 bytes and the title reads "Yigg.de | Bald Online", which means soon online.

It kept that promise, after a fashion. In July 2014 yigg.de came back at twice the size as a magazine for viral content, the format a lot of failed European community sites got converted into around then.

~ off by two months ~

The German Wikipedia says yigg.de has been offline since March 2017. The archive disagrees by two months: a full 15,187 byte page on 10 May 2017, a redirect on 1 June, then server errors from October and nothing readable after that.

None of this happened in a language I was reading at the time. German social news in 2008 was a closed room for me, and by the time I had any reason to look, yigg.de was a viral content lander.

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