What happened to Rebelde.com?

I almost totally forgot about my “What happened to” series. I only remebered it after seeing some search keywords that ended up in my blog. See, there are still people who are wondering what happened to these sites/projects.

Anyway, I’m not sure if some of you remembered or knew about Rebelde.com but it was one of the “most controversial” sites during the forums era in the Philippines (circa 2000). Rebelde.com is a new forum and free email service launched in 2000 and owned by some Fil-Am family based in Las Vegas. They literally had hundreds and hundreds of Tagalog domain names used as free emails powered by Outblaze.

It was the only Filipino-targetted forum which offer to pay from Php1.00 to Php10.00 per post to all members That got it to become the talk fo the town. The management tried to buy into PinoyExchange.com but after they were rejected, they reckon they’re better off using the supposed fund to kick-start a new forum and what better way to pump-up membership than to promote pay-per-post. A lot of people were skeptical and there was a huge fight debate amongst the members of both forums.

Anyway, 2 years into the project, and hundreds of thousands of payouts later, the project was canned. The forums were doing well, the shopping service was bringing in sales from OFWs but the emails from Outblaze sucked (though it got Edsamail into some stiff competition). Later on, the forum DB got corrupted and was never restored back.

The plan was scrapped since it was not going the way it should be, which I didn’t understand in the first place even if I was one of the assigned mods in the forum and their “contact person” in the Philippines. It was a classic Bubble 1.0 disaster.