Yupi.com

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

~ the eulogy ~

Carlos Cardona and Camilo Cruz set up Yupi Internet in Miami Beach in May 1996, on a thesis that reads as obvious now and was a genuine bet then: several hundred million people wanted the web in Spanish, and nobody was building it for them. The portal went public on the web the following year. The Internet Archive's first copy of the front page is from 11 December 1997 and it is under three kilobytes, a directory with a search box.

Money followed fast. By 1999 the company had taken as much as $150 million from investors including Sony and Comcast, opened offices across Latin America and Spain, and started buying. CiudadFutura, one of the first Spanish-language online communities and at that point held together by more than 200 volunteer webmasters, came in that year. There was a women's site, MujerFutura. There was a video property, YupiTV. The front page grew from three kilobytes to six and a half, which in 1999 was a lot of links.

An IPO was set for the spring of 2000. The Nasdaq picked that spring to fall apart, the offering never happened, and a company with a $150 million burn rate and no revenue to speak of was suddenly holding the wrong end of the decade. On 19 December 2000 Yupi cut two thirds of its staff.

~ the dossier ~

~ sold to the phone company and the software company ~

On 21 June 2001, T1msn announced it was buying Yupi Internet. T1msn was the Mexican joint venture between Microsoft and Telmex, and the pitch was expansion into the US Hispanic market, a phrase that appears in the press release more often than the word Yupi does. The price was never disclosed. Analysts at the time put it near $50 million, which against $150 million raised is not a rescue so much as a salvage.

The archive dates the handover better than the press did. yupi.com served its own front page for the last time on 1 June 2001. By 2 July it was answering with a permanent redirect to yupimsn.com, and it never served anything of its own again.

~ the notice that outlived the portal ~

YupiMSN ran for another three years as a co-branded destination, shipping MSN Explorer in Spanish that August and gradually becoming indistinguishable from the rest of Microsoft's Spanish output. Sometime between 17 March and 11 April 2004 the site stopped being a site. What replaced it was a two-kilobyte page in MSN's house template that began "Queremos informarte que YupiMSN.com ha cambiado", we want to let you know that YupiMSN.com has changed.

That page stayed up until 2007. The portal had been gone for six years by then and the apology was still there, which is a long time for a redirect notice to keep working when the thing it apologizes for has no users left to read it.

~ the distance here is a language ~

I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, in the same years Yupi was spending its second hundred million. The gap was never about timing. It was that the entire product existed in a language I did not read, aimed at a continent I had no reason to look at, and the portals I did open were in Turkish or in English. Spanish-language web history is one of the larger blank spots in what I can personally account for, and Yupi is near the top of it.

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