Top 10 Popular Websites That Died
This list is inspired by YouTuber Matthew Santoro. Have you ever seen a website become very popular at one point and all of a sudden, it died? Well, these are perfect examples of these websites that once had millions of fans, but then fell on their own feet and died. Hi, I'm Pnut, and today I'll be telling you the Top 10 Popular Websites That Died.
Quite some good memories for many people back in the early days of the internet. While it isn't 100% dead yet, it's been on "internet life support" for so long, it's begging to be put out of its misery.
Myspace was a social networking site and a precursor to the popular Facebook. Between 2004-2010, it was considered the most popular social media website. But that darn Facebook came along and killed Myspace. Eventually, Myspace became a platform for artists and musicians, and is still somewhat popular. But let's be honest, the old version is pretty much dead now.
It would be quite surprising if you had never heard of this game. Being an MMO owned by Disney, it had over 250 million members and was a multi-million-dollar website. It began development in 2004 and was officially launched in mid-2005. The game was eventually purchased by Disney.
But then things started to go wrong. They failed to update a lot and were too focused on selling everything else. The game eventually lost many players and shut down in 2017.
I loved playing this game when I was a kid. If anyone wishes to play Club Penguin again for nostalgia, you can check out Club Penguin Rewritten (it's a recreation of the original game and it's safe to use).
Gawker was a blog website that reported on the lives of famous celebrities. It originally covered news of celebrities in Manhattan, but soon expanded and, at one point, had over 23 million visitors every month.
However, a sequence of problems led to the shutting down of Gawker. There was a load of copyright abuse on the website, and it quoted sources that were supposed to be off the record. The craziest thing was that Hulk Hogan sued them for having video footage of him doing something 18+. This resulted in Gawker filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 2016.
Launched in 2005, Bebo was a big hit in social media for a few years. Being popular in several regions around the world, it had over 10 million users in the UK alone.
Due to its popularity, it attracted many big-name companies, and in 2008, it was bought for over 800 million dollars. What separated Bebo from other websites was that profiles could be very customizable. Since Facebook became more popular (seriously, Facebook is a murderer), Bebo died quickly, but it would still try to relaunch several times.
Just like Wikipedia, Nupedia was an online encyclopedia that allowed people to search any topic they wanted. Lasting only 4 years between 1999-2003, the peer review process of this website was very strict. It also had volunteers as contributors who wrote articles, but they first had to be reviewed in order to be published. Nupedia wasn't very successful, and Wikipedia eventually became an iconic and infamous website on the internet.
In 1999, online social media was becoming popular, and Friends Reunited was one of those websites. Before Twitter and Facebook became the big players, a British website called Friends Reunited tried this out.
This website allowed users to join social groups based on what school they attended. Some people really liked this idea since it sounded cool to meet their friends again. In 2005, the company was bought by another company. But between 2007-2008, it lost many users due to the rise of Facebook.
Before there was the legend known as Google, there was a very popular website called AltaVista. Created in 1995, this website was a web user world where users could find content very quickly. The most unique thing about it was that it had a very advanced web crawler which looked for websites, and when a user searched a term, it was ready at hand.
But in 2003, it started to quickly die due to the popularity of Google, and the website officially shut down in 2013.
Three years after the launch of eBay came a website called Yahoo! Auctions, made by the popular search engine Yahoo! in 1998. Like eBay, Yahoo! Auctions allowed users to list items they wanted to sell. At the time, Yahoo! was one of the biggest names on the internet. Despite that, eBay was still ahead by a lot due to its safer way of buying items. By 2007, most of the servers were shut down around the world, and Yahoo! Auctions was no more.
If you ever wanted to know a website for making video sharing popular, look at YouTube. But at the time when YouTube reduced ad revenue, there was a website that began in 2014 called Vidme. Vidme allowed another way to make money from their videos. Despite creating a lot of content, Vidme was shut down in 2017 because the cost of hosting millions of user-generated videos could not be paid for.
The Newcomers
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007, and owned by Oath Inc.At the time, Delicious was a very interesting thing on the internet. It just couldn't stay relevant forever. Delicious popularized the idea of social bookmarking, which allowed people to bookmark and organize online content in an accessible way.
It took off in 2007 and was really popular, but with cloud storage and saving bookmarks from different devices, Delicious became somewhat pointless. It was discontinued around 2017.
I loved Vine and still love it. It's sad that it had to be taken down and was replaced with things like TikTok.
Vine was a goldmine of excellent memes and successful personalities.
I believe it was the first "shock" site on the web. It was active from 1996 to 2012.
The website still exists, but you can't create any new accounts, and the community is gone.