Not Dexter’s laboratory! That’s the reason why I’m a scientist! :(

I find it befuddling that the shareholders haven't tried to get rid of Zaslav.

He’s doing what they want - extreme cost cutting. A necessity when your debt load is $42 billion and your market cap is $17 billion.

I’m utterly amazed how such unenviable situations are even remotely possible…

What is it about digital content that turns people into hoarders? It's not like they are deleting episodes of Dexter's Lab. I would be surprised if anyone on the entire Slate staff had spent more than 5 minutes consuming content on Cartoon Network's website in the last year.

Why should it scare me?

My culture is not products that others prepared for me to lure me into watching advertising.

Did someone expect these companies to maintain publicly available archives of these products well after it's relevance had faded?

If it's really important to you, I'm sure pirates have it. If not, maybe this should motivate you to get involved in piracy.

I used that website a ton as a kid and teen. The games were actually really good.

the old site is available under https://www.cartoonnetworkhq.com/ (at least I think that's the old website)

Yes it should scare us, but it won't. That is because we have all been trained to expect this. Sort of like a negative Pavlov's Dog.

We’ve taking it for granted that every company has a web site. But what purpose to web sites serve for companies?

There’s marketing, obviously, advertising what the company does. There’s e-commerce, directly selling the company’s products. They should ideally have a sort of encyclopedia of information about the company and its products and services past and present. And of course, they should offer a directory of ways that people can interact with the company, their customer support, etc.

For a company like cartoon network, there’s no e-commerce. There’s no customer support. There’s no documentation. There are no products.

They should make cartoon network into an encyclopedia of all the information about the network, past and present. All the programming schedules, all the shows, and their credits, etc. But doing that is a big project that costs money to build and maintain perpetually. Does it make money? No, it’s just the right thing to do. And its a job that’s already done by wikipedia, imdb, and so many fan sites. Even if they succeed and become the best source for that information with the top search result, what’s the benefit? How much revenue will they be rewarded with for stealing that traffic back from wikipedia?

That leaves marketing. What purpose is cartoonnetwork.com as an advertisement for cartoon network? It doesn’t show up high in search results. Anyone who visits it already knows about it. Social media platforms serve the purposes of the marketing department. The web site is largely a waste of time and money for them.

So this sort of company that has no ecommerce, no products, no reason to directly interact with customers, doesn’t have much reason to have a web site in 2024. I think we’ll see a lot of companies in the same position delete their web sites as well going forward.

Kinda sad.

I used to work on this particular site (and all Turner properties more broadly), and there was a culture internally of talking about the site visitors not as customers but as the audience. Our real customers were the advertisers after all.

CartoonNetwork.com (and CNN.com and adultswim.com and so on) all had a reason to exist, and it was primarily funded by marketing and advertising. The interesting takeaway from Zaslav completely axing a site like this is that it's indicative of advertisers not being the cash cow that they once were.

This lens is valid but not the only one.

There is also the archaeological / historical lens. This website has been around 26 years.

The Internet is a real cultural artifact. Not sure we should leave it entirely up to the companies on how valuable a given web site is ...

I got over being scared or shocked by this sort of thing. If it's only the internet, be it content, or services, or whatever, then it's only temporary. To think otherwise is to court disappointment or disaster.