Squidoo was a revenue-sharing article-writing site. Articles were called "lenses". In 2010, the site consisted of 1.5 million lenses . On August 15, 2014, founder

Seth Godin Seth W. Godin is an American author and former dot com business executive. Background After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, he used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment in ...

announced that

HubPages HubPages is an American online publishing platform developed by Paul Edmondson and was launched in 2006. Hubpages acquired its main competitor, Squidoo, in 2014. In 2018 Seattle-based content company "TheMaven, Inc." acquired Hubpages. Hubpages w ...

had acquired Squidoo.

History

Development started in 2005. The launch team consisted of Seth Godin, his book editor Megan Casey, former ''Fast Company'' employee Heath Row, Corey Brown, and Gil Hildebrand, Jr. The first version was developed by Viget Labs.

Site structure

Squidoo was a user-generated Web site which allowed users to create multimedia pages without an understanding of

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

.Interview of Seth Godin on Squidoo
''Stone Temple Consulting''. June 20, 2007. Godin called articles "lenses", because he saw them as " ocusinglight and howingus what we need to see." Writers were called "lensmasters". In Squidoo's early stages, Godin noted that

Martha Stewart Martha Helen Stewart (, ; born August 3, 1941) is an American retail businesswoman, writer, and television personality. As founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she gained success through a variety of business ventures, encompassing pub ...

and

Jane Goodall Dame Jane Morris Goodall (; born Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall on 3 April 1934), formerly Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Seen as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best know ...

's lenses did not receive large amounts of traffic, whereas lenses on myspace and the online game ''

Line Rider ''Line Rider'' is an internet game, with versions available for Microsoft Silverlight, JavaScript, Javascript, Windows, and Adobe Flash, Flash. It was originally created in September 2006 by Boštjan Čadež (also known as "fšk"), a Slovenian s ...

'' were among the site's most successful. Godin announced in January 2006 that the company would start a profit-sharing system whereby lensmasters would receive affiliate income from ads they placed in their lenses.Squidoo.com
''Washington Post.'' January 8, 2006.

Reception

After its debut, Squidoo was profiled in

CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by the M ...

, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'',

MSNBC MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and political ...

, and ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

''.A Home Where Bloggers Can Plumb Those Obscure Passions
''

.'' April 10, 2006.Tahmincioglu, Ev
Beware of social networking overload
''

NBC News NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's var ...

''. July 21, 2008. The site was given top prize in

South by Southwest South by Southwest, abbreviated as SXSW and colloquially referred to as South By, is an annual conglomeration of parallel film, interactive media, and music festivals and Convention (meeting), conferences organized jointly that take place in m ...

's community/

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

category in 2007. Squidoo challenged established information Web sites like

About.com Dotdash Meredith (formerly About.com) is an American digital media company based in New York City. The company publishes online articles and videos about various subjects across categories including health, home, food, finance, tech, beauty, l ...

and

eHow eHow is an online how-to guide with many articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions. eHow articles and videos are created by freelancers and cover a wide variety of topics organized into a hierarchy of categories. Any eHow use ...

for traffic, while it remained similar in unique visitor numbers to other revenue-sharing sites like

Mahalo.com Mahalo.com was a web directory (or human search engine) and Internet-based knowledge exchange (Question-and-answer website) launched in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis. It differentiated itself from algorithmic search engines like Google and Ask.com, ...

and

HubPages acquisition

On August 15, 2014, Godin announced that Squidoo had been acquired by HubPages in a friendly takeover. In common with many revenue-sharing sites, Squidoo's traffic and income had been declining for some time and if it had not been sold to HubPages, it would not have been financially viable to maintain the site. In the announcement on the Squidoo site, Godin explained:

They’re ubPagesthe industry leader, continually pushing the envelope in terms of their content, its presentation, and the traffic and traction they get online. The best way we know to serve our users is to give them an even better place for their content, and when I talked with Paul Edmondson at HubPages, it became clear to both of us that combining these platforms leads to a stronger, more efficient, more generous way to share great stuff online.

Users were warned to save their pages, as only the top-performing Squidoo lenses would be transferred to HubPages.

References

{{Reflist, 2 Online publishing companies of the United States Internet properties established in 2005 2014 mergers and acquisitions