Zoopy

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

~ the obit ~

Every country with enough bandwidth tried to build its own YouTube between 2005 and 2008, and almost all of those attempts died the same boring death, out-scaled by the original. Zoopy is worth reading because it died of something else. It was bought and funded and kept alive, and then the people who owned it switched off the one feature that defined it.

Jason Elk and Pat Elk started it in Cape Town in 2006, closed beta at the end of that year and public beta on 5 march 2007. It did video and photos together, with a social layer around them, and it was pitched as the first of its kind in South Africa. In december 2007 Nokia named it regional imaging partner for South and West Africa, which meant handset-to-site uploads at a moment when almost nobody in the country had a camera that was not a phone.

Vodacom, one of South Africa's two dominant mobile networks, bought 40 percent on 26 june 2008. In february 2009 it went to 75 percent. In august 2010 it took the rest. A mobile operator now owned the country's video site outright, and that is the sentence the whole ending hangs from, because an operator's interest in a video site is not the same as a video site's interest in itself.

South Africa's internet did not reach me and i am not going to pretend otherwise. What is legible from here is the shape of the problem, because Turkey had the same one at the same time and never even got as far as an attempt: a real audience sitting behind expensive bandwidth, and a global competitor that had already won before any local version could finish building.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the vodacom years ~

Being bought by a mobile network in 2008 looked like the best outcome available. Video is expensive and bandwidth in South Africa was some of the priciest in the world, so an owner who sold bandwidth was, in theory, the perfect parent. It solved the cost problem and it put the site in front of millions of subscribers who were already being billed by the same company.

What it actually did was change the question being asked of the product. YouTube did not have to justify itself against an operator's data revenue. Zoopy did. Every strategy discussion after 2008 was implicitly about whether this thing sold megabytes, and a site full of free clips uploaded by strangers is a very indirect way to sell megabytes.

~ the pivot ~

On 1 february 2011 Zoopy stopped accepting user uploads. That is the death, whatever the calendar says. It relaunched as a mobile video platform producing its own news and entertainment clips, capped at ninety seconds and two or three megabytes each so a viewer on a metered prepaid line could afford to watch one. Elk was straightforward about the reasoning in public: people had settled on their video upload service and it was YouTube, and he did not want to end up as the MySpace of the situation.

The logic was sound and the arithmetic was explicit. Data cost around thirty cents a megabyte, so a three-megabyte clip had a knowable price, and the company could sell advertising against content it owned rather than against uploads it merely hosted. What it gave up was the reason anyone had an account. A social video network without the uploads is a small publisher, and small publishers compete against every other publisher on earth.

~ what is at the address now ~

In july 2012 both founders left, following news that Vodacom intended to sell a significant part of its stake. The site pushed out one more update in november. By december 2012 it was gone, with no announcement worth the name, six years after the first closed beta and not quite two years after it had stopped being a video sharing site at all.

zoopy.com answers today with a 200 and it has nothing to do with any of this. It is a WordPress affiliate site publishing product reviews and buyer's guides, running Google tag manager and link-monetization scripts, with no reference anywhere on it to Cape Town or to what used to be there. Somebody bought a domain with residual search authority and pointed it at gadget listings. That is not a revival, it is a headstone with a stranger's name carved over the top.

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