Tripod.com is a
web hosting service now owned by
Lycos. Originally a company aimed at offering services to college students and young adults, it was one of several sites trying to build
online communities during the
dot-com bubble. As such, Tripod formed part of the first wave of
user-generated content.
Services
Tripod offers a variety of free and paid web hosting services including 20
megabytes of
webspace and the ability to run
Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts in
Perl. In addition to basic hosting, Tripod also offers a
blogging tool, a photo album manager, and the
Trellix site builder for
WYSIWYG page editing. In addition to its free service, Tripod also offers a variety of for-pay services including additional disk space, a shopping cart,
domain names, web and
POP/
IMAP email.
History
Tripod originated in
1992 with two
Williams College classmates,
Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey, along with
Dick Sabot, an economics professor at the school. The company was headquartered in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, with Peabody as CEO. Although it would eventually focus on the internet, Tripod also published a magazine,
Tools for Life, that was distributed with textbooks, and offered a discount card for students.
[Elliott, Stuart. "Interpublic invests in an Internet provider aimed at 'the transition generation' of young adults". New York Times, May 28, 1997, p. D5.]Website launch
Tripod.com officially launched in
1995 after operating in "sneak-preview mode" for a period. Billed as a "hip web site and pay service for and by college students", it offered how-to advice on practical issues young people might deal with when first living away from home. It planned to charge a minimal fee and make money primarily on commissions from partners who would sell products on the site. Other services available included
résumé writing features and a simple
homepage builder.
Although the feature was an afterthought originally, Tripod soon became known as a place where people could create free web pages, competing with the likes of
GeoCities and
Angelfire. Criticizing
AOL, the existing leader in this space, for its
walled-garden approach, Peabody described the company's aims: "Our idea is to build a community through user-created and user-based content." A
Washington Post reviewer recommended Tripod over GeoCities for giving users an easier URL to remember, and because GeoCities sites had a tendency to crash computers.
Investment and buyout
After receiving an initial investment of $4 million in
venture capital, led by New Enterprises Associates, in May 1997 Tripod took an additional round of investment totaling $10 million. By this time the company had grown to 40 employees and was hoping to reach profitability by the 1st quarter of 1998. The second group of investors included
Interpublic, which paid $2.5 million for a stake in Tripod estimated at 10 percent, thus implying a valuation of $25 million for the company overall.
As it turned out, Tripod would be sold in February 1998 to Lycos for a reported $58 million in stock.
Lycos also ended up owning Tripod's former competitor Angelfire, picked up as part of the acquisition of
WhoWhere. The two properties were run concurrently, with Tripod continuing to focus on its college-age audience while Angelfire tended to attract
high school users. In early 2001, Tripod reached 6 million registered users (up from nearly 1 million at the time it was acquired) and was expanding at an estimated 250,000 new sites per month. However, generating profits remained difficult, with an analyst opining that they needed better user profiling so the sites could generate the results expected by advertisers. They also had the challenge of not alienating users while trying to make money. By the end of the year, Tripod and Angelfire also introduced account options allowing users to pay in order to keep their sites ad-free. GeoCities, itself now acquired by
Yahoo!, would follow suit not long afterward.
Domain name
Web sites generally are a
subdomain of tripod.com. However, users can pay a monthly charge and own a domain name.
Paying in this manner also allows for other benefits, such as more disk space for the site which allows the site owner to put more information onto it, and personalized email accounts (i.e. yourname@yoursite.com).
Shutdown Rumor
On January 18, 2009 the
blog TechCrunch erroneously reported that Lycos would be shutting down the Tripod service on February 15, 2009. In actuality, the February shutdown was correct but applied only to Lycos Europe and so only users of Lycos Europe services were affected. By the afternoon following the initial TechCrunch article, Lycos posted an entry on their Lycos Buzz blog explaining this and assuring readers that Lycos US and the Tripod service were not shutting down. TechCrunch subsequently corrected the error in their original article.
See also
