Delius Klasing is now also doing something with the Internet
The most important optical development steps of YACHT online
Interview with YACHT sports director and online project manager Lars Bolle
Lars Bolle, the time has come on October 22nd, YACHT online celebrates its 20th birthday. You experienced the start of the online world of the YACHT live and actively helped to shape it. How can we imagine what exactly happened on October 22nd, did you just put the page online with a click of the mouse?
Close. Sometime in 1996, I was fresh at YACHT, said the then editor-in-chief during a magazine conference, almost as if in a subordinate sentence, that the publisher wanted to "do something with the Internet now". Anyone who is interested should contact him. When I just think back: If nobody had contacted us, wouldn't we have an online presence today? I was young and needed the money, so I got in touch.
I introduced myself to the then publishing director as "the man for the Internet". I wanted to know what exactly they were up to. "Now every publishing house is doing something on the Internet, and ads are already being sold, so must we," I remember. "We want to put some content from the YACHT online every 14 days. But not too much, otherwise people won't read the magazine any more …" There was no real, big strategy at the time and there were also hard discussions in the publishing house, accompanied by fears of cannibalization.
The pages were built by an external agency at the time, at first I only sent them Word documents. The actual starting shot was extremely unspectacular, I had the only internet connection in the editorial office, so if you wanted to see the page, you had to come to me. I can't remember the excessive interest on the part of my colleagues
Did you already have a vague idea of where YACHT online's digital journey would go?
Lars Bolle
It's hard to believe, but yes, we did. The internet exploded. We switched to daily news pretty quickly, including the slogan "Die Tageszeitung für Segler" - simply because there was a lot more to report than we initially thought. It quickly became clear that the speed of the web could be an ideal complement to the magazine, especially in the news sector. We then did things at the same time, for example at AOL (for the younger ones: that used to be an internet provider). We were so-called IP, Individual Producer, there were masks that I wrote in, and only the AOLers received these messages. Such services still thought they could monopolize the network. But back to the question: I still remember exactly, when a student came to the Internet to strengthen it, around 1998, we spun out what options we would soon have with pull-out slides on which the digital YACHT could be read on the train, with embedded videos and direct connection to a database to get comparison values, with animated graphics, etc. Honestly, we believed that back then. When I see almost everyone typing on a smartphone on the way to work today, we weren't so wrong. How has working as an online editor changed in the last 20 years?
If you look at the first online presence, there were completely different constraints and barriers than today. For example, one of the first message pages only has a data volume of 2 KB (!), Consists of only a few lines, without a picture. You had to keep it so slim, because otherwise with the 56 K modems of that time (perhaps one or the other still remembers the unmistakable sequence of beeps and scratching noises) it would have taken ages for the page to build. With today's fiber optic cables and technologies such as lazy loading, data volume is hardly a problem, which opens up completely different possibilities.
In addition, the start was a one-man show that required maybe one to two hours of working time every two weeks. Today all YACHT editors and also some freelancers are also online editors. Updated several times a day, they report on everything important, worth knowing or even entertaining from the world of sailing. With almost 200,000 readers and around 1.7 million pages viewed per month, YACHT online is today not only the undisputed market leader in German-speaking countries, but also one of the largest water sports websites in the world.
In the two decades of its existence, YACHT online has also continuously developed. Moving images were added with the company's own YACHT tv brand, as well as one of the world's largest used boat platforms. YACHT online today offers a huge download archive with tests and area analyzes, gripping photo series and much more.
Not to forget the forum, one of the largest German-speaking sailing communities, Facebook and Twitter with around 10,000 friends and followers. What's next with YACHT online? Are there any new projects planned? And whether! Something very interesting will soon be on display here, and there are also extremely exciting projects in the long-term planning. But sorry, more is not yet revealed, let yourself be surprised
Interview: Carsten Hark
Do you fancy a journey through time?
YACHT online 1996
Here you can click through the YACHT online homepage 20 years ago … (Note: minimize the browser window to about 640 pixels wide, this corresponds to the screen resolution of the time.)