medved.nn.ru was the website of Nizhny Novgorod-based LLC Trading House "Medved" ("Bear"), a wholesale supplier of food products and tobacco goods. As the home page stated, the firm had existed "since October 1993" and was "one of the oldest food-trading firms in Nizhny Novgorod," with its wholesale depot located at: Nizhny Novgorod, Shakespeare Street, building 1[2]. The site opened at the address medved.nn.ru on 1 December 2001: "The site has moved! Our new address is http://www.medved.nn.ru," the news feed announced[1]. Surviving snapshots of the home page span 2002-2009, and the site was listed in the Nizhny Novgorod site directory on nn.ru[4].

What the site looked like

An early snapshot from 30 January 2002 catches the home page in the form of a "Site News" feed, which shows how the page was being assembled. On 1 October 2001 — "Site reconstruction has begun," with the sections "Addresses, phone numbers" and "News" added; on 14 October the "Contests" section was added; on 22 October "The site design has changed"; on 6 November a "News archive" appeared; on 25 November — "Analytics"; on 8 January 2002 three route maps were added, and on 10 January "The page reviewing our suppliers and their products started working." A separate line from 28 December 2001 reads: "Attention! We have new phone numbers!"[1]

By the mid-2000s the home page was occupied by a corporate press release, with a contact block at the bottom: "Phone/fax: (8312) 58-43-43, 50-80-28," the email address medved@mts-nn.ru, and a link "Route map to the office and central warehouse"[2]. The nn.ru directory described the site in one line: "TD 'Medved' is a company engaged in the wholesale trade of food products"[5].

What the firm said about itself

The press release on the home page listed an assortment of "more than 3,500 items": tobacco and confectionery products, chocolate, coffee, tea, beer, carbonated drinks and juices, and pet food. The firm called itself an official dealer of "SDS-Ekom," "Khors," MBI, "Kraft Foods," Paulig, "Kuppo," "Mars," "Russky Shokolad" (Russian Chocolate), "Unilever CIS," "Orimi Trade," "DK Avalon," "Wrigley," "Storck," Ferrero, "Van Melle," MelFoods, Riston, and a direct partner of brewing companies — "SUN Interbrew," "PK Baltika," "Volga-Invest," the Kaluga Brewing Company, the Ochakovo Brewing and Bottling Plant, and Heiniken (spelling as in the source)[2].

The firm assessed its own share of the Nizhny Novgorod market as follows: tea — 55%, coffee — 40%, tobacco — 20%, beer — 25%, packaged chocolate — 55%[2]. The structure, as the page presented it: five wholesale warehouses and three containers at small-wholesale fairs; its own licensed security service of thirty people; a delivery department with forty-nine vehicles and more than 150 sales agents, serving over seven hundred customers in the city and region; a retail network of 20 mini-shops and 4 shops with plans to develop a "convenience store" format; a distribution center operating from 7:00 to 24:00. The wholesale depot on Shakespeare Street occupied 3.5 hectares — 8,000 square meters of warehouses and a thousand square meters of office space; the vehicle fleet numbered 50 GAZelles, 35 GAZons, 2 KamAZ trucks, a Mercedes, a ZIL, a MAZ, 32 IZH-Kabluk vans, and 6 passenger cars. Staff numbers as of February 2004 were given as "about 700 people," monthly turnover as "more than 5 million dollars," and the number of regular customers over eleven years of operation as more than two thousand[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site appeared in the nn.ru directory in two categories at once — "Firms (Enterprises): Consumer Goods, Shops: Food Products" and "Firms (Enterprises): Consumer Goods, Shops: Wholesale Trade." Next to the link, the directory showed a Counter.nn.ru counter reading, where the site was registered under number 1661 (the link led to counter.nn.ru/?1661)[4]. In the 8 September 2002 edition of the "Food Products" category it had "Rating: 18"[4], and in the 26 August 2003 edition of the "Wholesale Trade" category — "Rating: 1"[5]. What exactly this number represented — daily visits, hosts, or a position in a list — cannot be reconstructed from the surviving directory pages; the methodology and surviving samples of the counter are examined separately in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating. In any case, medved.nn.ru belonged to the most common layer of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet — corporate pages of local firms set up for the sake of an address, a phone number, and a route map.

In the surviving results table of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote for 2004, the domain medved.nn.ru does not appear[6].

How it closed

The site had stopped updating long before it disappeared. The snapshot from 30 April 2009 — the last one preserved — shows exactly the same press release as the snapshot from 24 January 2005, down to the line "Staff numbers as of February 2004" and the phone numbers with the old 8312 area code[3]. That is, for five years the home page stood with unchanged text, only changing the section heading from "PRESS RELEASE" to "NEWS"[2]. No later snapshots of the home page have survived in the web archive: the last snapshot is dated 30 April 2009[3]. What became of the firm itself, our materials do not say.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2009 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Food Products" category, 2002 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, "Wholesale Trade" category, 2003 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Voting results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archive)