About Nana10

Nana10

Nana10, originally called Nana, was one of Israel's largest internet portals and a Hebrew-language news site. It began in 1999 in Haifa as the content arm of the internet service provider Netvision, at a time when an access provider also wanted to own the page its subscribers landed on. Over nearly two decades it combined a news desk, culture sections, an internet magazine, forums in several languages, an email service, e-commerce ventures and, from 2006, the Israblog blogging community. In June 2007 the commercial television station Channel 10 bought half of the company and the portal was renamed Nana10; Channel 10 acquired full ownership in May 2014. The portal was closed on 11 December 2017, when its address began redirecting readers to Channel 10's new site, and its history closed with the merger of Channel 10 into Reshet 13 in January 2019. This profile therefore describes Nana10 in the past tense throughout.

Founding in Haifa in 1999

Nana was established in 1999 as the content department of Netvision, then a major Israeli dial-up internet provider. Its first offices were inside Netvision's offices in Haifa. The name Nana was chosen in the hope of making its internet address, nana.co.il, memorable and easy to type. The company's first chief executive was Zeev Alon, its first editor was the journalist Gadi Shamshon, and its first technology lead was Idan Yuval. The founding belonged to a period in which Netvision's management, under chief executive Ruth Alon, attached importance to creating internet content as well as selling connectivity, and Nana was the portal built for that purpose. Shortly after the site was founded, the record label Nana Disk and its manager Nitzan Zeira sued it, demanding its internet address on the grounds of their exclusive use of the Nana trade name since 1988. Nana Disk lost the case, and the portal kept its name and address.

A multilingual portal for a multilingual country

Nana was originally planned as a multilingual portal suited to the different populations living in Israel. When it launched, visitors could reach opening pages in Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian, and a department inside Netvision translated the portal's site index into the three additional languages, together with a limited amount of content. Over time the English language version was abandoned, the portal remained trilingual for a period, and eventually the multilingual idea faded in favour of a larger volume of content in Hebrew alone. Even so, the multilingual beginning distinguished Nana from purely Hebrew competitors and reflected its origin inside an access provider serving the whole public, including Arabic-speaking and Russian-speaking Israelis who were coming online in large numbers at the turn of the century.

News, forums and community services

The portal's core offer combined editorial content with community services. Its news service published news items and articles by Channel 10 News reporters and by the site's own writers, and in its Channel 10 years the site carried live broadcasts and a video-on-demand service for the channel's programmes. Its forum system, relaunched in 2002 with an investment reported at the time, was one of the largest discussion spaces on the Hebrew internet. The site also maintained a directory of websites, including a service called Nana Express that let a surfer reach a desired site directly. Content channels covered celebrities, culture and entertainment, food, a studies portal and an online channel, and a section called Gamer served the computer-games community with articles, forums and features. A service called Planet Nana let users build and host small personal websites, with storage of up to five megabytes, using an interface that required no prior knowledge of site building.

Early e-commerce ventures

During 2000 the young portal also moved into electronic commerce, which was then in its infancy in Israel. It sold tourism and vacation packages together with a travel partner, launched a domestic tourism portal for booking hotel rooms in Israel, sold compact discs in cooperation with the NMC record company, sold books with the Modan publishing house and opened an online shop for electrical appliances. Despite this activity, advertising remained the portal's main source of revenue over the years. In November 2005 Netvision replaced its earlier NetAction brand with Nana Shops, an e-commerce site built with an investment of about one million shekels. From 2008 to 2011 Nana Shops was actually operated by Walla Shops under a revenue-sharing agreement; the two companies announced the end of that arrangement in February 2011, Nana10 entered the group-buying field through a cooperation with the daily-deals aggregator Cliqa, and Nana Shops closed in 2012.

Israblog: the blogging community Nana bought

The acquisition that kept Nana culturally alive long after the portal format had declined elsewhere was Israblog. Founded on 8 August 2001 by Yariv Havot, Israblog was one of Israel's largest blog sites and the place where a large share of Israeli teenagers kept online diaries. On 13 June 2004 Israblog signed a cooperation agreement with Nana under which its storage moved to Netvision's server farm. On 4 October 2006, after three months of rumours and negotiations in which Havot had also talked with at least two other companies, Nana acquired Israblog outright, as Globes reported that day. On Israblog's fifth anniversary in 2006, Havot said that more than 5,800 messages were posted on the site every day. Under Nana and later Channel 10, Israblog remained a distinct community inside the portal. When Nana10 closed in December 2017, Israblog was scheduled to close on 31 December as well, but it remained active after reports that Channel 10 had agreed to open contacts with a group of its bloggers about transferring the Israblog servers into their hands.

NanaMail and the portal's everyday services

Like other portals of its era, Nana competed to be the user's daily starting point, and email was central to that ambition. NanaMail arrived in 2005, when Nana offered a free mailbox of three gigabytes in a heating competition over mailbox size among Israeli providers; the service later operated as a Microsoft account using Outlook.com. NanaMail closed in August 2014. Around the email and news core sat the portal's other everyday services: online Flash games under Nana10 Games, the forums, the site index and the shopping areas described above. Together they made Nana less a single news publication than a small internet ecosystem, of the kind that large portals such as Walla and Ynet also built in Israel's first internet decade.

The Channel 10 purchase and the Nana10 name

In June 2007 Channel 10 bought 50 percent of Nana from Netvision, in a deal that valued the portal at about 22.5 million dollars, and the site's name changed to Nana10, later styled nana10. Following the purchase, the site's entire management tier was replaced and a large volume of Channel 10 content was integrated into it, including video reports from Channel 10 News in the current-affairs channel and dedicated sites for channel programmes such as the reality show Survivor 10. At the change, Zeev Hasper served as the site's chief executive and editor-in-chief; when he moved to a role at Channel 10 in December 2008, Guy Eliav was chosen to replace him in managing the site. Earlier, in December 2003, Ronen Shamir had been appointed the portal's editor-in-chief. Academic accounts of Israeli media concentration describe the same turning point: nana10.co.il, which started as Netvision's content arm in 1999 when Netvision was a major dial-up provider, became a partnership between 013 Netvision and Channel 10 in 2007, while earlier independent portals such as Netking and Start had to close because they could not compete with the large media groups.

The 2008 redesign and the backlash

On 18 July 2008 Nana10 relaunched with a sweeping design and structural change entrusted to the British designer Neville Brody. The site replaced its classic navigation with a division by themes — content, fun, people, shopping, Channel 10 — moved to a grey background with fluorescent-coloured headlines, changed its logo, and added a modular widget component called nana-me. The launch was accompanied by a television and internet campaign, but it was riddled with failures and drew intense criticism from graphic designers and fury from surfers. Many forum users abandoned the forums in anger and moved to the Agenda website's forum system, and the number of entries to the site fell significantly. In an interview with Globes three months after the launch, vice-president of marketing Boaz Shoval broke the company's silence, admitting that maintaining the old site while switching to the new one had been no simple task, saying the responses were more vehement than expected, and setting a target of 450,000 unique users a day while conceding the site would not surpass Ynet in the coming year. During 2009 the design was softened several times to fix faults in the new interface, and a year later it was replaced entirely by a more solid design on a white background.

Ownership changes: JCS, then full Channel 10 ownership

In early October 2012 Netvision sold its half of the site to the communications company JCS for about ten million shekels. JCS, owned by businessman Ronald Lauder, then held 50 percent of the site, while Channel 10, in which Lauder also held shares, held the other half. In March 2014 TheMarker reported that Nana10 was dismissing employees and was expected to be absorbed into Channel 10, with a loss of about ten million shekels; the site then had about 45 employees. In May 2014 Channel 10 bought all of JCS's shares in Nana10 and the site passed into its full ownership. In September 2014 the site's logo was replaced as part of absorbing the site's activity into Channel 10, and three years later, ahead of Channel 10's move to broadcast channel 14, the site's logo was changed to match the channel's, with no mention of the word Nana at all — the last logo the site used appeared between 1 November and 11 December 2017. The portal's headquarters in its later years were at 1 Korazin Street in Givatayim, the Channel 10 base, far from its Haifa birthplace.

Closure in December 2017 and what followed

In October 2015 Channel 10 announced it would concentrate all of its digital activity under the Channel 10 brand and stop using the Nana10 brand. The end came on 11 December 2017, when the site closed as part of Channel 10's move to new servers and to the domain 10.tv. That day the Nana10 address began automatically transferring surfers to the new site's address, although the mobile version of Nana10 continued operating for a while longer. As part of the move, most of Nana10's services were closed, except those connected to the channel and a parents-and-children portal, and the thousands of pages and video clips published on Nana were transferred to the new Channel 10 site. After Channel 10 merged with Reshet into Channel 13 in January 2019, the address served News 13, and after the News 13 site was renewed, the old Nana10 address redirected to Channel 13's site, 13tv.co.il. What began in 1999 as an access provider's content department in Haifa thus ended as a redirect — but for the generation that argued in its forums and wrote in Israblog, Nana and Nana10 remained a formative home of the Hebrew internet.