iFreebies.com was proudly relaunched during the late hours of February 27th, 2011. While the website is brand new, we have history in Freebies going back to 1996.
Originally we started as a fun personal site in the days of local internet service providers and websites like GeoCities. This was our first attempt at a website and covered items from free stuff, fun stuff, and my favorite links. Kind of a personal playground as I knew nothing about HTML or this new thing called the internet. Our original web address was www.athenet.net/~kbell. That tilde sign in the url should give away just how early this was. We named the site "ArticA: The Lost Web Site". Don't ask me why, I really don't know. We were just having fun. How did the free stuff get on this site? Well we had discovered an array of 1-800 numbers that you could call companies and get samples. I had a notebook I would keep these in. Soon friends and family wanted copies and the distribution grew. With the internet I decided to remove the photocopier from the process and put them online. Back then most companies websites were pretty rough as well so it was common to have a main page and still call an 800 number to request your free stuff. Wow, doesn't the mid to late 1990's sound like the stone age?
Not long after launching this site our visitors started to grow and I looked into getting my own url and ditching that tilde sign. Since I had committed to that crazy Artica name (and nobody else would register such a name) I went with www.articafreebies.com. This was around 1998 and for awhile I ran both websites independent of each other and linked backed to one another. Eventually I ditched the first site and went full bore with artica. I slowly started to lose the cute, other type item references, and focus strictly on freebies. Freebies and free stuff expanded into sweepstakes and contests as well. Looking back at this site you can see old frames and gaudy early internet icons that have become dated long since. Artica was growing fast but I still was not happy with the name. It was approaching the dot.com bubble heights and I wanted a real name that said it all.
After verifying any half-way decent name was taken, I started to look at purchasing a name. I narrowed down the lists of available names for sale and their very high prices. I even tried myself to purchase existing names and websites. After a long process I formally purchased and transfered www.ifreebies.com. It was not a cheap endeavor and one my wife thought I was slighly mad to do, but we went forward with it. (I also registered ifreebies.net and .org guessing they would be worth a fortune in a few years... NOT.) I launched iFreebies.com in April 2000. I ran iFreebies and articafreebies side by side for quite some time. I kept building new sections of each website and we were growing fast. At one time our visitor count was insane (I could only hope to repeat that now). We were a runaway success but the speed was getting out of control.
Late in 2001 and early 2002, interest really waned on my part. Looking back I think a couple of things happened. First my site, iFreebies, was going at mock speed. I had so many links and so many visitors I really couldn't keep up. I tried to reinvent the site in a way that the freebies would date themselves and the community of visitors could interact with each other and comment on the free stuff. I even got rid of the very much smaller articafreebies site as a way to focus my time. The second thing that happened was life. We had the first of our three kids right before this time and they were taking a bigger and bigger role in our lives. It was hard to spend hours everyday searching the web for new freebies and broken links. Eventually something had to give, we shut down.
Since that time our lives have gotten even more hectic but we've learned how to handle it better, I think. Freebies are still in our blood and we kicked around the idea of relaunching iFreebies many times. I kept coming back to the same website limitations though. Over time we let our other free sites expire and only kept the best one www.ifreebies.com. As a result you will see some of the other ones still running. Some are legitimate sites and others are just trying to capitilize off of old traffic patterns we built up. We are not associated with any of those sites.
It was only recently that we discovered the way to the future... Blogs! I know, I know, blogs have been around quite some time. True, but we hadn't used them. We started to play with blogs on some personal hobby sites we have and discovered the true power of them. Blogs would be our answer. We decided to relaunch iFreebies as a blog. No big sections of stand alone pages, just blogs. The beauty of this design is the listings date themselves. You can see what's new and search what's old. You can also comment on the listings and tell each other what's expired and what you've won, etc. By writing with some care, they are fully sortable by categories or labels and the site is searchable. Problems solved!
With that in mind we relaunched on February 27th, 2011. We are more excited than ever and looking forward to reacquainting with old friends and making many new friends. Now we need your help, spread the word. Visit often. We need traffic and tons of it. The more we get, the easier it is for us to update.
So welcome back to the new iFreebies.com. We are glad you could come visit. Sign up for all the free stuff you can handle. We hope to see you around here a lot.
