Nexopia
Nexopia is an online lifestyle magazine and the largest youth-oriented social networking platform in Canada, established in 2003 by software engineer Timo Ewalds. Designed primarily for Canadian youth, the platform allows users to create profiles, manage friend lists, and engage in discussions through forums covering various topics such as fashion and music. Nexopia combines social networking with original content that appeals to a younger audience, including articles on college life, tattoos, and music trends.
Since its inception, Nexopia has attracted over 1.5 million users, with the majority being Canadian. While it offers free basic accounts, it also provides a paid subscription service with enhanced features. Despite its popularity, the platform has faced criticism regarding privacy issues, particularly concerning the default settings that could expose users’ personal information. Nonetheless, Nexopia has carved out a niche for itself, catering specifically to younger users who prefer a platform not dominated by older demographics, setting it apart from competitors like Facebook. The interactive nature of the site, including blogs and real-time messaging, encourages self-expression and community engagement among its members.
Subject Terms
Nexopia
Nexopia was an online lifestyle magazine and, at one time, Canada’s largest youth-oriented social networking platform. Created by software engineer Timo Ewalds in 2003, Nexopia allowed users to create their own profiles and maintained their list of friends, blogs, photo galleries, and articles. It also allowed users to participate in forums where they could discuss topics such as fashion or music. After launching in 2003, the website had over 1.45 million users, over 95 percent of them Canadian. Alongside the social networking aspects of Nexopia, the website also published original content covering topics appealing to a young audience, including music, tattoos, fashion, and life as a college student. The website met with criticism over the years for making user profiles open to the public, making it a tool for online predators. Nexopia was a free website but offers a paid subscription service with additional features. Nexopia has not been operational since late 2023.
Brief History
Nexopia began as an online community called Enternexus, founded by Ewalds in Edmonton, Alberta, in February 2003. Ewalds developed Enternexus when he was eighteen years old as a hobby and as a way to communicate with his friends online. Initially, the website had only seventy members, during its beta-testing stage. When the website was relaunched as Nexopia, it quickly grew in popularity, with 225,000 users within the first twenty-two months.
November 2004 was the first month in which the company began to make a profit. Ewalds hired his first programmer in October 2005, and the company opened its first office the same month. By late 2006, Nexopia’s team had grown to twenty-five employees. For these first six years, Ewalds wrote the majority of the code for the website while also acting as the leader of the development team. During this time, Ewalds focused on strengthening the website’s security, optimization, and search capabilities. In February 2008, Nexopia secured a multimillion-dollar investment from Burda Digital Ventures, one of Germany’s largest venture capital firms.
On September 8, 2008, Nexopia launched a revision to its user profile pages. This was the largest update since the website’s launch in 2003. The update contained a streamlined layout, image resizing, and greater control of messaging capabilities. To help promote the update, Nexopia held a "Pimp Your Profile" contest, with the grand prize being a 20-inch iMac computer. Participants in the contest were asked to utilize all of the new updates to express themselves in unique ways on their profile page.
Nexopia ran into trouble in February 2012 when Canada’s privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, found that the website had breached the country’s privacy law. The website’s default privacy settings were the main issue, which allowed Nexopia to indefinitely keep a user’s personal information, even if they are younger than eighteen. Toronto-based digital advertising company Ideon Media acquired Nexopia in November 2012. Nexopia continued into the 2020s, but, by late 2023, had ceased operations.
Overview
Nexopia was an online lifestyle magazine and social networking platform aimed at Canadian youths. Over 95 percent of its users were Canadians. Unlike other popular social-networking platforms, such as Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), Nexopia also functioned as an online magazine that offered articles concerning youth-related topics, including fashion, college life, and music. Another major component of Nexopia were its forums, where users could interact and discuss a variety of topics. Nexopia’s forums were once among the most popular on the Internet. One of the most popular forums was "site general," where users could voice their concerns and comments about the website.
How Nexopia Worked
Users could sign up for a free basic membership account that gave them access to all of Nexopia’s standard features, including creating a profile, uploading photographs, private messaging, and posting in the many forums. Nexopia also offered users a "plus" account, which required paying a subscription fee to use. The plus account allowed users to see who visited their profile, get spotlighted on Nexopia’s homepage, upload forty times more photographs, and gain access to other customizable options not available with a basic account. When signing up, users could create their own username and customize who can view their profile.
On Nexopia’s forums, users could discuss a variety of topics, including the website’s functionality, entertainment, and relationships. Users could also create their own forum about a topic of their choosing. They could customize these forums to make them either private or open to any user. Nexopia hired people to moderate the forums to ensure that no one violated the website’s terms of use or posted sexually explicit photographs. Nexopia had a strict policy against posting nudity, violent images, and racist remarks.
The website did encourage its users to be outspoken about their culture and communities. To further support this, Nexopia allows users to create their own blogs that other users can read. These blogs could include text, photographs, and videos. There was also a section of the website called "shouts," where users could post messages on a "wall" that was updated in real time. Private messages could also be sent from the shout wall. Although there was no Nexopia mobile application, users could use their phone’s text-messaging service to access the website’s private messaging and shout functions.
Nexopia offered companies the ability to advertise with traditional online advertising as well as unique website-wide campaigns that targeted a specific demographic. Since Nexopia was aimed at younger users, advertisements were generally from businesses in line with that audience, such as concert promoters and technology companies like Apple.
Popularity
At one time, Nexopia was the most popular social-networking platform based in Canada. There were over 1.2 million member accounts, and nearly all of those users lived in Canada. Although the website lost many of its users to Facebook in 2009, Nexopia had over 500,000 active users and a hit count of over 33 billion in 2011.
Nexopia’s biggest competition was always Facebook, the US-based social-networking website that had 3.065 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2023. Despite not being as popular as Facebook, Nexopia was favored by many users since the website was not embraced by older generations and remained a youth-orientated service. Although there was no formal announcement of Nexopia ending, users found the site inaccessible after late 2023.
Bibliography
"Canadian Social Networking Pioneer Nexopia Acquired by Digital Ad Network." BrainStation, 9 Oct. 2012, brainstation.io/magazine/canadian-social-networking-pioneer-nexopia-acquired-by-digital-ad-network. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
Koul, Scaachi. "Nexopia Is an Online Utopia for Teens." Maclean’s, 14 Aug. 2012, www.macleans.ca/society/technology/nexopia-is-an-online-utopia-for-teens. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.
"Nexopia Attracts Major European Investment." BrainStation, 4 Feb. 2008, brainstation.io/magazine/nexopia-attracts-major-european-investment. Accessed 29 Jan. 2025.