yahh.agava.ru was an "mp3 collection" — an amateur catalogue of music files with search by artist and song title, running on the free hosting service agava.ru in 2000–2002[1]. In a surviving sample of the Counter.nn.ru rating for the year 2000, the site is listed in the "Projects" section — that is the trail by which it entered our census of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet (on the sampling method, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating). The page itself gave no Nizhny Novgorod markers of its own: the surviving snapshots of the home page show no address, no phone number, and no mention of the city by name — the author signed only with a "write to me" link to an email address[1][2].

The collection and search

The site's layout was simple. On the left stood a vertically set "mP3 cоLlection" and a menu of eight items: "home," "list," "money," "Top!," "Top 25," "Top 50," "Top 60" and "e-mail." In the center was a search form with two fields, "Artist/band" and "Song," with a note that the characters "*" and "?" stood for any number of characters or a single arbitrary character[1].

Below the form ran a counter: "Songs in the collection today: 5351" in the snapshot from October 18, 2000[1], and "5390" in the snapshot from May 8, 2001[2] — over seven months the collection grew by 39 entries and, judging by these two figures, had practically stopped.

A news feed tracked the growth of the collection; its earliest entry is dated February 15, 2000 — "The first thousand songs added." Further on, as the home page reported, on February 19 "the ability to search by song title or artist appeared," on February 22 "the ability to order a file by mail was added," on February 24 new material arrived from Adriano Celentano, Mashina Vremeni, The Sweet, Nazareth and the Rolling Stones, along with a technical caveat: "File names have the extension zip; after downloading it must be changed to mp3." In March "about a hundred" songs were added[1].

On May 4, 2000, the collection changed shelter: "The collection has moved to www.agava.ru (free web hosting: unlimited space, CGI, Perl, PHP, database access, domain, etc.), new address yahh.agava.ru." Where it lived before the move, the snapshots do not say. On July 11, 2000, it was announced that the collection held "more than 5000 songs"[1].

Money, sponsors and affiliate programs

From the middle of 2000 the music side of the site gave noticeable ground to earning money. On July 26, 2000, "a section on earning money online appeared, links only to verified programs," reached through a separate "money" menu item; on August 7 a free T-shirt was offered along with the sponsor ThatPays, "paying for your sign-ups at various free services." The same page carried the blocks "FREE address of the form Name@Surname.com," "Win a computer" and a NamePlanet email registration form[1]. The page's keywords confirmed as much: "mp3, music, музыка, money, деньги, спонсоры, заработок"[1].

By May 2001 the lower half of the home page was taken up by an entire "Реклама / Adversting" table — a numbered list of seventeen items with captions in Russian: a free email service on your own domain, a news feed ("though all in English"), a mailing list, site promotion, the Pollit.com and Voizz.com polls, the advertising broker Commission Junction — "The most reliable advertising broker. Pays 100% to Russia." A separate block, "Халява, бесплатые лотереи / Win big for free!," listed casino drawings, "Win a Dell Pentium 4 Computer," "Free Sony Playstation 2 Giveaway" and "Win a Million Dollars"[2].

Music news and external charts

The site's last substantive news items date to November–December 2000 and are no longer about the collection itself. On November 10 it was reported that Vyacheslav Butusov and "Deadушки" were recording the album "Elizobarra-Torr," and that a maxi-single, "Nastasya," was about to appear in stores, along with — as the home page put it — "the first internet single in the history of music, 'Zvezda.'" On November 13 the albums "Kinoproby-1" and "Kinoproby-2" were mentioned — "Tsoi's songs in a new interpretation." On November 19 a link appeared to a "Rating of the best MP3 sites!," and on December 20, another T-shirt giveaway[2].

The site aligned itself with nationwide Russian music charts rather than local ones: the 2001 snapshot shows a row of buttons for TopHolmRu, Awesome Warez, Hit-Parad, CoolTop.ru, NatashaTop, Pesni.ru and Pop Top100, and search across other catalogues was handed off to the service ah-ha.com[2]. No numerical counter.nn.ru rating value for this address survives in our samples, and no votes for it are recorded in our data; the address does not appear in the results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day for 2004[4] — though by then the site no longer existed.

How it closed

The collection stopped being updated at the turn of 2000 into 2001: in the snapshot from May 8, 2001, the most recent news item is dated December 20, 2000[2]. In the snapshot from April 2, 2002, the address served up a single line — "We've Moved!"[3]; this page contained no catalogue, no search, and no link to a new location, and whether it belonged to the previous owner of the subdomain or to a later one cannot be established from the snapshot.

In all, our web-archive sample lists 14 snapshots for the address, the last dated November 29, 2002. As of our check, the domain yahh.agava.ru does not respond today.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)