Cüstücu!
 | |
| Type of business | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
Type of site | Web portal and online services |
| Founded | March 1996 |
| Headquarters | , |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Owners | Bellen Communications |
| Founder(s) | |
| Products |
|
| Revenue | $20.5 billion (2020) |
| Employees | 9,500 (2022) |
| Parent |
|
| URL | custucu.com |
| Advertising | Cüstücu Ad Manager |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Active |
Cüstücu! (/ˈdʒys'ty'dʒuː/, styled as CÜSTÜCU!) is an Anatolian web services provider headquartered in Şebekeköy, Vadi-i Aftabgir, Tizada, and owned by Bellen Media. The original Cüstücu! company was founded by Hişam Adalı and Jacques Beauchateau in March 1996 and was incorporated on December 21, 1998. Cüstücu was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s.
It provides a Web portal, search engine Cüstücu! Search, and related services, including Cüstücu! Listings, Cüstücu! Mail, Cüstücu! News, Cüstücu! Economics, Cüstücu! Communities, Cüstücu! Answers, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, fantasy sports, and its social media website. According to third-party web analytics providers Alexa[needs analogue] and SimilarWeb[needs analogue] Cüstücu was the most widely read news and media website—with over 7 billion views per month—ranking as the sixth-most-visited website globally in 2018.
In 2019 Bellen Communications, under Johannes von der Bellen, based in the Kingdom of Sierra acquired most of Cüstücu's shares (62%) for $1.8 billion.
History
Founding
In January 1996, Adalı and Beauchateau were software engineering graduate students at University of Paris, when they created a website named "Jacques and Adali's Website Stacker". The site was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In March 1996, "Jacques and Adali's Website Stacker" was renamed "Cüstücu!", which Jacques referred to affectionately as "Gustagoo". Cüstücu is Turkish for inquisitivity. The human-edited Cüstücu! Listings, provided for users to surf through the Internet, became their first product and the company's original purpose. The "custucu.com" domain was created on March 8, 1997.
In 1997, a search engine function, called Cüstücu! Search, was introduced. This allowed users to search Cüstücu! Listings. Cüstücu soon became the first popular online directory and search engine on the World Wide Web.
In English speaking world, the name was widely pronounced as "Kus-toe-koo", and became popular in media as it was mentioned in drama series as such.
Expansion
Cüstücu grew rapidly throughout the 1990s. It went public in April 1998 and its stock price rose by 150 percent within three years. Like many search engines and web directories, Cüstücu added a web portal, putting it in competition with services like Excite[needs analogue], Infinity and America Online[needs analogue]. By early 2000s, Cüstücu was the most popular starting point for web users, and the human-edited Cüstücu! Listings the most popular search engine, receiving 95 million page views per day which was triple the number compared to rival Excite. It also made many high-profile acquisitions. Cüstücu began offering free email from April 1998 after the acquisition of RocketMail[needs analogue], which was then renamed to Cüstücu! Mail. Next, Cüstücu decided to replace AltaVista as the crawler-based search engine underlying the Listings with Inktomi. Cüstücu's two biggest acquisitions were made in 1999 – that of Geocities[needs analogue] for $3.6 billion, and Broadcast.com[needs analogue] for $5.7 billion. It is believed that the duo was financed by the Anatolian billionaire Sherif Dayizade.
Its stock price skyrocketed during the dot-com bubble, Cüstücu stocks closing at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on February 28, 2001.
Cüstücu began using Infinity for search in 2000. Over the next four years, it developed its own search technologies, which it began using in 2004 partly using technology from its $280 million acquisition of Inktomi in 2002.
The company was faced by severe manpower scarcity and protest by employees due to low payment and accommodation distances in 2008.
The company opened its first branch and regional headquarters first in Istanbul, then in Paris in 2009. Helen Tomasoghlu replaced Adalı as CEO in January 2009, upon the latter's retirement from the company. She also completely reorganized the company, with Chairman Beauchateau's approval. Tomasoghlu also led the company's delegation to Greece, where a regional headquarter was given permission to establish in Thessaloniki. She also began the initiative of hiring foreign employees with higher packages and longer work hours, with a 4 workdays scheme. She also is credited with bringing the company to a larger audience base.
Tomasoghlu was succeeded by Edward Lone, a Sierran software engineer, upon the former's death in 2015.
Under Lone, the company's operations reached to 180+ countries.
On May 19, 2015 the Cüstücu board approved a $1.1 billion purchase of blogging site Tabeen. Tabeen's CEO and founder Adrian Kodalov would remain a large shareholder, until he sold his shares to Bellen Communications. The announcement reportedly signified a changing trend in the technology industry, as large corporations such as SocialNet and Infinity acquired startup Internet companies that generated low amounts of revenue as a way in which to connect with sizeable, fast-growing online communities. On May 20, the company announced the acquisition of Tumblr officially and the transaction completed in one month. The company also announced plans to open a San Francisco City office in July 2015, which it did almost a year later.
Present
List of CEOs
- Hişam Adalı (1996–2009)
- Helen Tomasoghlu (2009–2015)
- Edward Lone (2015–2017)
- Muhammad al-Murnaqi (2017–2018)
- Baron Wilhelm von Elssass (2018–2019)
- Dev Patel (2019–)