Yonja

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

~ the last words ~

yonja had its turkish moment around 2005 to 2008. for two or three years before facebook localized to turkish, yonja was the social-network address everyone with a dialup or fresh adsl connection in turkey gave you. it sat in the same window as msn dominance and internet-cafe counter-strike, the early turkish web before the global platforms paved over it.

the company was kerim baran's project. he was a turkish founder who had been at harvard and siebel before launching the site from san francisco on 1 february 2003. the original quote was three hundred members on day one. anyway, the ui was english-only for the first two years and turkey adopted it regardless, which surprised the founders and probably accelerated their decision to lean into the turkish market formally.

by 2008 yonja had taken a $12.5 million series a from greywolf capital and tiger global. the company claimed about a billion page views per month at peak and around five million members. it was the canonical first wave of turkish social internet, before facebook had a real turkish-language interface and before the global wave hit.

the decline started around 2008 to 2009. media coverage in turkey began pointing at the site over drug-dealing allegations and prostitution accounts, which dented its credibility with parents and with the broader audience. around the same window, facebook shipped a real turkish localization. the migration started, and inside about eighteen months most of yonja's core audience had moved over. by 2010 the dominant position was gone. yonja media group kept the brand going for years in smaller shape, and the yonja.com domain bounces through redirects today rather than serving any active social-network product.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the early-2000s turkish internet was small enough that a single site could become a default. yonja got the shape right for the moment, a profile-and-friends model with a turkish-friendly comment system, on a server stack that did not collapse when you tried to load it over 33.6k or freshly-installed adsl. for a few years it was where high school and university audiences ended up, plus a fair number of older relatives once their kids signed them up.

i did not personally have a yonja profile in the strong sense, more browsing through friends' pages than maintaining one of my own. but it was impossible to be online in turkey in 2005 to 2007 and not see yonja links circulating. msn was where actual conversations happened. yonja was the social-presence default for a few years before facebook took the slot, while sites like donanimhaber held the hardware-talk space.

~ the fall ~

the media coverage in 2008-2009 was where things turned. turkish newspapers picked up the line about drug deals and prostitution being arranged through the platform, which is a story that follows almost every successful social network at some point and lands harder in some markets than others. in turkey, with parents already wary of what the internet was doing to their kids, it landed hard. usage among younger teenagers started to feel risky in a way it had not the year before.

the platform did not collapse. it stopped growing. the user base that had been the engine of the site started spending more time on facebook, which had no equivalent media problem at the time and was actively localizing into turkish through 2008 and 2009. once your friends moved, you moved. by 2010 the network effect that had built yonja over six years was running in reverse.

~ the actual end ~

there was no clean shutdown announcement. yonja media group tried to keep the brand alive by spinning off adjacent products like metroliste (a turkish craigslist) and 7inci (a turkish dailycandy). none of the spinoffs replaced the lost mainstream attention.

the main yonja site kept publishing for a while in a smaller and smaller form, then the domain stopped serving the social network at all and bounced through redirects. there is no public 'we are shutting down' post that i can find. it just stopped being the place anyone went, sometime around 2010 to 2012, and the residual properties slowly shed too.

~ what got buried with it ~

what died with yonja was the version of turkish social internet that was built by a turkish team for turkish users. everything after it was facebook in localized form or instagram in localized form, both american by default, with turkish wedged into the interface afterwards. yonja was the last large-scale attempt at a turkey-first social platform that actually got popular, and that whole product category went with it.

the auto-playing music profile pages and the comment threads that read like graffiti walls all lived in the gap between irc and proper social networks. yonja was the largest of the turkish hangouts that died one after another between about 2009 and 2014, with hi5 taking some of the same audience before dying too. by the mid-2010s the entire turkey-first SN era was over.

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