Zip.net

» see zip.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Zipmail opened in august 1998, which is also the year I got online in Turkey on a modem that topped out at 33.6k. That overlap is the only thing connecting me to this grave. Free webmail was landing in a dozen countries at more or less the same moment, and in almost every one of them a local company got there before the Americans did and briefly looked unbeatable at home.

Marcos de Moraes built Zip.net and put Zipmail in front of it as the first free web-based email in Brazil. The internal plan was three hundred thousand accounts in the first year. It passed a million in eight months, and at the peak it was taking on eleven thousand new users a day, which in 1998 was an absurd number for anything in Brazil that did not involve a television transmitter.

Around the mailbox they hung a portal. Zipchat for talking to people and Zipshop for buying things from them, with travel booking arriving later. This was the standard shape of the era everywhere. Get somebody to an address they check every morning, then sell them the rest of the internet on the way past. In february 1999 PT Multimédia, the media arm of Portugal Telecom, paid $365 million for the whole thing. It was the first large Brazilian internet acquisition and it set the number that everyone in the country spent the next two years arguing about.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

For a couple of years Zip was one of the names you had to mention when describing the Brazilian web. Zaz was the other big domestic portal, later folded into Terra, and UOL was the paid subscription giant sitting above both of them. Zip's advantage was that it owned the habit. An email address is not a website you visit, it is a thing you are. Switching one in 1999 meant telling everybody you knew.

The problem with owning a habit is that habits are cheap to run and hard to charge for. Portugal Telecom had bought a portal at portal prices, and portals in 1999 were valued on the assumption that advertising would arrive at American rates. In Brazil it did not, and by 2001 nobody anywhere was paying those rates either.

~ what really happened ~

In june 2001 UOL and Portugal Telecom became partners, and Zip moved across into UOL as part of the arrangement. That was the end in practice, because UOL already had a portal and did not need a second one competing with itself for the same Brazilian advertising budget.

From 1 november 2001 the portal was gone. The chat product and the shopping section both closed, and the editorial content moved behind UOL's subscriber wall where it belonged to a business model that charged money. What survived was zipmail.com.br, the one part that had actually worked. A company that had cost $365 million was reduced to a login page for email, which is a fairly honest admission about which part had ever been worth anything.

~ the long tail ~

Zipmail then did something almost nothing from 1998 manages. It kept working. The domain briefly reappeared in 2010 serving Brasil Online content, more of a redirect than a resurrection, but the mailbox itself ran until 29 september 2022. Twenty-one years after the portal around it was switched off, people were still receiving mail at addresses they had registered as teenagers.

That is the part worth keeping. The expensive thing died in three years and the free thing lasted twenty-four. Everybody in 1999 was valuing the portal and treating the mailbox as the lure that got people there. It turned out the lure was the product, and the product was the packaging.

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