magma.r52.ru — the website of Magma-Treyding, a Nizhny Novgorod wholesale company supplying canned fish, meat, dairy and fruit-and-vegetable products, tea, coffee and vegetable oil[2]. As the home page stated, the company was "well known in Nizhny Novgorod" and had come a long way "from a small grocery store to the strongest wholesale canning company in Nizhny Novgorod"[2]. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru, and the page footer carried the phone number (8312) 50-40-75[2]. Web Archive snapshots of the home page span the period from February 3, 2002 to July 16, 2010[4].

The mid-2000s site: canned goods and "entertaining reading"

The version preserved in March 2005 was a simple catalog site with a text menu and the copyright line "© Magma Treyding 2003"[1]. The top menu items were "Home," "About Us," "News," "Our Prices," "Site Map," "Contacts"[1]. The "Products" section was divided into subsections: "Canned Fish," "Canned Fruit and Vegetables," "Canned Meat," "Canned Dairy," "Tea" and "Frozen Products"[1].

A separate menu item led to "Entertaining Reading" — a section about tea unusual for a wholesale price list: "The Taste of Tea," "Time for Tea," "Tea Gardens" and "Excerpts from a Chapter Written by Anthony Burgess"[1]. Another item led to the VARYA shopping center[1].

The 2010 version: a personal account, order requests and a survey

By the last surviving snapshot, taken in July 2010, the site had become noticeably more elaborate. The home page now featured a "Submit a Request" form and a client login block with "Login" and "Password" fields, along with links "Registration," "Edit Data" and "Forgot Password?"[2]. Navigation was reduced to the sections "About the Company," "Contacts," "News," "Catalog," "Karpov" and "Promotions," alongside a list of trademarks: MIKADO, RANDA, TRANS-MARIA, KRKK, BELGOROD, FUROR, GLAVPRODUKT, KARPOV[2].

The home page was dominated by a visitor survey: as the home page stated, "we are conducting research on knowledge of the canned fish market and our Karpov brand in particular," and "the most active guests will be rewarded with memorable prizes"[2]. In 2010 the news feed was topped by entries from 2008–2009: April 21, 2008 — about a 720 ml pitted-cherry compote under the Karpov brand, made in Hungary; February 25, 2009 — about new canned-goods items; April 2, 2009 — a notice "WE ARE 16!" stating that on March 31, 2009 the company OOO Karpov had celebrated its sixteenth anniversary[2]. The "About the Company" text on the same page spoke of a thirteenth anniversary marked on March 31 — meaning it had been written three years earlier and never updated; both counts point to 1993 as the start of the company's history[2]. The footer carried the lines "Developed by Web Mekhanika" and "2010 Copyright Magma-Teyding" — with a typo in the company's own name[2].

What the company said about itself

According to the site's description, "Magma-Treyding" (Магма-Трэйдинг) controlled "more than half of the sprat products market" and a third of the canned fish market in the Volga Federal District, acting as a distributor for manufacturers from the Baltic states and Russia[2]. As the home page stated, deliveries went "to practically all retail stores and chains in Nizhny Novgorod: Karusel, Olson, Ramstor, Raytsentr, Medved, Perekrestok and others," as well as to Kazan, Yoshkar-Ola, Cheboksary, Ulyanovsk, Saransk, Izhevsk, Kirov and Ivanovo[2]. Since 2004 the company had run a "Genuine Canned Goods" program, whose mark it applied to products from factories in Russia, Hungary and Latvia — sprats, sprat pâté, smoked Baltic herring, green peas, corn, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, lecho; the program also launched the company's own canned fish brand, Karpov[2]. The company's name was spelled inconsistently on the site — "Magma-Treyding," "Magma-Treyding" (Магма-Трэйдинг) and "Magma-Teyding" appeared side by side on the same page[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet, and closure

The site belonged to that part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet made up of corporate presences of local wholesalers: not a media project, but a storefront and, later, a tool for taking orders. In the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating, on which our Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating is based, magma.r52.ru does not appear, and it is absent from the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote in 2004[3].

The Web Archive preserved thirty-two crawls of the home page[4]. The last snapshot is dated July 16, 2010[2]; no later versions of the site have survived, and the address is no longer live today. What became of the company itself after 2010 cannot be established from the archival materials available to us.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2010 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — List of magma.r52.ru snapshots in the Web Archive (archive)