84% of what the web linked to in 2010 is gone | 0.mk<br>July 25, 2026<br>84% of what the web linked to in 2010 is gone<br>An old 0.mk database backup held 657,958 links created between 2009 and 2014, along with their click counts. We sampled destinations from the first three years and opened them again in July 2026. Only 16% still loaded anything. The other 84% were unreachable or returned an error.<br>Most 0.mk users were in Macedonia, so this is not a census of the entire web. It is a large surviving record of what one online community shared during that period, including local news, personal blogs, photo hosts, forums, and the major platforms of the time.<br>When 0.mk started in 2009, three people worked on it for a few hours around their other work; none of them worked on it full time. Years later, one of them stumbled across the old database backup on a disk he had kept and decided to reboot the service.<br>Here is what those five years of link creation look like, with the long silence after them:<br>2009: 3,668 links20094k2010: 20,368 links201020k2011: 103,056 links2011103k2012: 23,149 links201223k2013: 224,960 links2013225k2014: 282,524 links2014283k2026: 378 links2026378Links created per year. The gap is the decade nobody was home; the green sliver is the 2026 relaunch.<br>The survival test<br>We deliberately limited the random sample to destinations shortened between 2009 and 2011, so every link had at least 15 years to age. We requested each one, following redirects, with a normal browser user agent. One bar, three fates:<br>Unreachable: 78%Broken: 6%Still loads: 16%<br>78% unreachable (domain dead, DNS gone)6% broken (404 / 410 / 5xx)16% still loads (including login walls)<br>And that 16% is generous: it counts pages that redirect to a login wall, a parked domain with ads, or a "this content is no longer available" notice as alive. Follow a link from the 2010 web today and you have roughly a one in six chance of seeing anything at all, and much less of seeing what the person who shared it saw.<br>The survivors are almost entirely the giants: YouTube, Wikipedia, Google properties. The small web, the personal blogs, the forums, the local news sites, the photo hosts, is what died. The web that survived is the centralized web.<br>A walk through the graveyard<br>The database reads like a museum of the 2010s internet. Some residents, with the number of links pointing at them:<br>Facebook photo CDN (fbcdn.net), every single one dead858 links
PureVolume, the MySpace for bands (dead 2018)804 links
Google Code (dead 2016)803 links
Rapidshare (dead 2015)159 links
Picasa (dead 2016)76 links
Megaupload (seized by the FBI, 2012)73 links
MySpace52 links
Orkut (dead 2014)18 links
Google Reader (dead 2013)8 links
Grooveshark (dead 2015)6 links
People shared Facebook photos as direct CDN links; all 858 of them now return nothing. Four of our fifteen most-clicked links of all time, almost 400,000 clicks combined, point into Facebook canvas apps for a Mafia Wars clone. The apps are gone; the platform that hosted them does not exist as it did; the clicks remain in our ledger like footprints.<br>The Macedonian layer<br>0.mk was the first Macedonian URL shortener, so the data is also a record of a national web that partly no longer exists. The links point to A1 Television (shut down 2011), and to the newspapers Utrinski Vesnik, Dnevnik, and Vest, all of which stopped publishing in 2017. Hundreds of links to local news that can no longer be read anywhere except, sometimes, the Internet Archive. The short links outlived the newsrooms.<br>The gems<br>Seventeen years of other people's bookmarks contain some treasures:<br>The first link ever shortened (July 14, 2009, 3:52 AM) was not a manifesto or a launch post. It was a CSS stylesheet on someone's WordPress blog. Two clicks, ever. Empires begin humbly.<br>On day two, someone shortened localhost. 0.mk/localhost pointed at http://127.0.0.1/. It got two clicks, each of which sent the visitor to their own machine. The shortest URL for the loneliest destination.<br>The shortest link points at the longest domain. 0.mk/1 has redirected 10,389 people to thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com, a 2000s curiosity that is itself now gone. Four characters pointing at sixty-three, for 17 years.<br>The longest URL we ever shortened is 38,753 characters , a 2012 CodePen link whose query string literally repeats TRYING_THE_MAXIMUM_URL. Someone was testing us. We passed, and we still have their test.<br>4,475 of our links point at other URL shorteners : bit.ly, TinyURL, goo.gl. A short link to a short link, twice the fragility. Google shut goo.gl down in 2025, so every one of those is now a chain with a missing middle: our half still works, and points at a service that no longer resolves. Link rot squared.<br>And the immortal one: 0.mk/7, created July 15, 2009, points at google.com. 95,999 clicks and counting, and it still points there today, seventeen years and one resurrection later.<br>Why 0.mk came back<br>By 2014, 0.mk's revenue...