15 Websites That Fell Off

If you're going to try to make it on the Internet, just know it's a full-time job. There are about 650 million active websites in the world, and that number is only going to get higher as time goes on. In the time that it took you to read the last two sentences, a few thousand new websites just popped up. On the other hand, though, a few of them died. Whether the site's creator fell out of love with the domain and turned the other eye, traffic stopped coming, or they ran out of funds to keep going, many websites end up having an expiration date. If you're a juggernaut that successfully made it out of the 90s, 00s, and going on into 2014, it's because you had enough fight in you to last when times were bleak. Here are 15 Websites That Fell Off. It's survival of the fittest out here.

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Launched: September 2010
Died: September 2012

Ping was Apple's attempt at building a social network around music. It could be accessed from iTunes, and would serve as a place where fans could connect with artists, aka: what Twitter (and Spotify), do. But, since it wasn't openly available to those who didn't use iTunes, Apple already limited their audience and it never picked up.

Launched: May 2004
Status: Died 2008

This was the site the Winklevoss twins tried building when Mark Zuckerberg "stole" their idea for Facebook. The site never took off because The Facebook had burst into existence, becoming the go to site while Zuckerberg left the Winklevoss' website to die, after he told the founders he would help them fix it.

Launched: August 2007
Status: Died June 2008

Based in New Zealand, the oddly named iYomu social network was tailored to be the social network for "grown ups," and aimed to have 10 million users by Christmas 2007. First problem: Facebook was already alive and kickin', and the people who wanted to sign-up for iYomu had to go through a long questionaire in order make an account. The site closed in June 2008.

Launched: 1999
Status: Almost dead

Xanga was one of the first blogging platforms to hit the mainstream back in 1999. It allowed users to upload weblogs, audio, photos, and a profile. Not shabby, huh? So what happened? Well, just as Facebook killed MySpace, MySpace helped kill Xanga, along with the help of Wordpress and Blogger. Xanga is still around, but its usership has been declining ever since 2007.

Launched: August 2006
Status: Died October 2006

The Hub was killed off 10 weeks after it was launched. Why? One word: Walmart. Yeah, this was Walmart's first jump into building its own social network, where kids could share the things they wanted to buy from Walmart. Shameless, shameless.

Launched: November 2010
Status: On life support

In response to Facebook's horrible privacy policies, the Kickstarter project, Diaspora, was started. It aimed to be a social network that would be a Facebook-killer. The developers said: "Our distributed design means no big corporation will ever control Diaspora. Diaspora will never sell your social life to advertisers, and you won’t have to conform to someone’s arbitrary rules or look over your shoulder before you speak."

They raised a ton of money off Kickstarter, but the four founders found themselves pushed up against the wall with expectations. When they finally got around to releasing it, its first public reveal was a disaster: it looked like Google+ with less features than Facebook. The website was shut down after one of the founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, killed himself. Now it is attempting to be revived by volunteers.

Launched: December 2004
Status: In a coma

Digg was a social news aggregator that let users put together there own collections of newstories. It was widely popular, but once Facebook and Twitter began growing their bases, the traffic left. The company tried to relaunch in 2010, but when the coding they were using messed up and brought a ton of bugs to the site, the users that were left quickly departed. Digg is still up and running in its current form, but is a shadow of what it once was.

Launched: February 2008
Status: Dead virtually everywhere

This was Yahoo's rip off of Digg. It allowed users to either vote up or vote down stories that appeared on its homepage. Not many websites were signed up for the service, and the site was a little buggy, so Yahoo! users didn't pick up on the service. In just under three years, Yahoo! closed its doors on Buzz.

Launched: January 2004
Status: Dead except in two countries

Orkut is still alive, though only in Brazil and India. Orkut was named after its founder, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten. It was supposed to be Google's first answer to social networking, but the site proved to be too slow for Americans, and lacked a lot of basic privacy settings. It only has about 33 million users worldwide. (Facebook has 1 billion.)

Launched: July 2006
Status: Died May 2012

EONS was once a site that had dreams of being a social network, for old people. (They were just asking for trouble.) It was founded by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, and built to be the exclusive social hub for people over 50. But, like any website that limits its user base to a relatively small group, they limited their growth. Especially when the group they were targeting isn't all that familiar with social media.

Launched: 2000
Status: Died May 2001

Daily Radar was once a gaming site trusted for its game reviews. But with the rise of sites like IGN, the Daily Radar took a hit, and closed its doors just after a year. Plus, it didn't help that they were known for destroying brand new Playstation 2s.

Launched: September 2003
Status: Dying

Del.icio.us isn't quite dead, but now it's dying under another name: Delicious. Okay, not that new, but it's new enough for other reasons. Del.icio.us was founded in 2003 as a way to save and share web bookmarks. Yahoo! acquired it in 2005, then sold it to AVOS systems in 2011. But after being tossed around, what made Del.icio.us cool (its search capabilites) had diminished, and search engines like Google caught up to make their search results more efficient. Del.icio.us isn't even mentioned anymore in conversation. Sites like Reddit are more widely used to find interesting links.

Launched: 2008
Status: Died everywhere except for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan

Yahoo, again, tried to rip off another idea. This time, eBay. Yahoo Auctions is exactly how it sounds: a place to bid on items other people are selling. The big difference between the two, though, was that Yahoo! Auctions didn't have seller's fees: instead, it got money from ads. This was a big change and, on paper, seemed to give Yahoo! an advantage, but it wasn't so. It closed in 2003 in the U.S. and Europe, but still functions in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan.

Launched: April 2002
Status: Died December 2006

Google Answers was a place to put a bounty on searches: Users went to the site, typed in a question, and paid someone to search for the answer. Usually between $2 to $200, the fees were called "bounties." If you wanted to search for, say, "How to make a girl fall in love with you," you'd put up a bounty for $5 and someone would search for you. You couldn't search for everything, though, as searches for x-rated things and other illegal content was banned. The site lasted four years, surprisingly, until Google pulled the plug.

Launched: 1997
Status: Died 2001

Launched back in 1997, SixDegrees tried to play off the old game "six degrees of seperation." It was a place where you could connect with friends, but you could only post messages: no photos or video. Hey, it wasn't easy growing up in the 90s. The site garnered 1 million users at its height, but was bought out in 2000 and shut down. SixDegrees helped pave the way for MySpace and Facebook.