ZAZ

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

~ the last words ~

Between the spring of 1999 and the spring of 2000, Telefónica bought the same company in four different countries. Olé in Spain, Ciudad Internet in Argentina, a Mexican operation, and in Brazil a portal called ZAZ. Three of those four are already graves on this site, which is starting to look less like a coincidence and more like a business plan with a shopping list attached.

ZAZ was the biggest of them. It came out of Nutec Informática, a software company founded in Porto Alegre in 1988 by Marcelo Lacerda and Sérgio Pretto, which moved into the internet business in October 1995 as an access provider called NutecNet. Grupo RBS, the media group that owned most of the newspapers and television in the south of Brazil, bought the internet arm the following year. On 1 december 1996 the portal went live under a three-letter name that means nothing in Portuguese, with a slogan that translates as your channel on the internet.

The dial-up business and the portal ran as separate brands for fifteen months. On 20 march 1998 ZAZ absorbed NutecNet and became one thing, an access provider and a content provider under a single name, which was the standard configuration everywhere in the world at that moment. By then it was already the second most visited site in Brazil. The 1997 numbers that survive are around a hundred thousand visits a day, fifty nine thousand paying subscribers and fifty one points of presence spread across the country.

I have no Brazilian memory to bring to this. What I recognize is the shape. For most of the world outside the United States, the whole internet arrived as one company selling you a phone number and a homepage you could not avoid, and for years it did not occur to anyone that those were two separate products. The homepage was where the modem put you. Nobody chose it and everybody used it.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

A portal in 1997 was a strange object. ZAZ ran chat, weather, a search box over a directory, and what was described at the time as one of the first entertainment channels on the Brazilian web. None of that was where the money was. The money was in the fifty one points of presence, because a point of presence is a local phone number, and a local phone number is the difference between a customer and no customer in a country the size of Brazil.

That is the thing every national portal of the era was actually selling, and it is why they all looked the same. The content existed to give the dial-up subscriber a reason to stay on the line. When broadband arrived and separated the connection from the destination, most of them found out that the destination had never been the product.

~ the sale ~

In june 1999 Telefónica picked ZAZ as the place to start its Latin American internet operation and paid roughly two hundred and fifty million dollars for fifty one percent of Nutecnet, which valued the whole thing at over five hundred million. Grupo RBS kept the other forty nine percent for seven more months. In january 2000 Telefónica took the rest.

The brand lasted five weeks after that. ZAZ stopped being ZAZ on 5 february 2000 and became Terra, which was the name Telefónica had chosen for the whole continental structure it was assembling out of Spanish and Latin American portals. Three months later Terra merged with Lycos, and the search engine question was settled the same way it had been settled in Spain: buy an American index and switch the local one off.

~ the inheritance ~

Terra Networks became one of the largest internet properties in Latin America on an audience that ZAZ had assembled house by house with fifty one local phone numbers. It survived the Lycos separation, the delisting, and another decade and a half of decline, and finally closed across most of its markets in 2017. The whole run traces back to a software house in Porto Alegre that got into the phone business by accident.

zaz.com.br does not resolve in 2026. Not parked, not squatted, not redirected to Terra. The Brazilian web's second most visited address for three straight years is now a domain that simply does not answer, which is the same ending ole.es got and is rarer than you would expect. Most dead addresses end up owned by somebody. This one ended up owned by nobody.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »