The rise and fall of MapQuest

Abstract

This article builds an historical account of the rise and fall of US mapping firm MapQuest. It charts the emergence and rapid rise of MapQuest as a popular early provider of online maps – detailing notable innovations, key developments, and successive ownership changes, and the significance of these for MapQuest – and it documents its equally rapid fall. The article draws on political economy of communication (and geographic political economy) approaches in its analysis of MapQuest. This critical framework is valuable for the way that it draws attention to the different stakeholders involved in controlling and commercialising MapQuest’s applications for web-based and mobile devices, and the structural factors that shape and influence the industries in which it operates. From this analysis, it is argued that a range of factors led to MapQuest’s dramatically diminished market share within the field of online mapping. These included: a lack of revenue generation opportunities; significant map data quality issues; loss of consumer visibility due to search algorithm interference; and a reactive rather than proactive approach to innovation under consecutive owners. This account of MapQuest is important in two ways. First, while MapQuest is a significant firm in the history of contemporary digital mapping, particularly as a pioneer of online distributed mapping, the firm’s history and its contribution to digital mapping remains under-represented in internet histories scholarship. Second, this article contributes to growing interest in and deepening critical understanding of platform precarity, asking: What becomes of platforms when they falter? And what are the factors that contribute to their decline?

Keywords:

• MapQuest
• online maps
• Google
• platform precarity
• dead platforms
• AOL
• Verizon

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Hannah Withers for her invaluable research assistance in the preparation of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rowan Wilken

Rowan Wilken is Associate Professor in Media and Communication, Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre for Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a core member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He has written extensively on location-based services and locative media and on social media platforms. His most recent books include Everyday Data Cultures (Polity, 2022, with Jean Burgess, Kath Albury and Anthony McCosker), Wi-Fi (Polity, 2021, with Julian Thomas and Ellie Rennie), Automating Vision (Routledge, 2020, with Anthony McCosker), Digital Domesticity (Oxford University Press, 2020, with Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, and Bjørn Nansen), Cultural Economies of Locative Media (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Location Technologies in International Context (Routledge, 2019, with Gerard Goggin and Heather A. Horst). At present he is working on a new book, Bodies and Mobile Media (Polity, forthcoming, with Ingrid Richardson).