asparaclub

» see aspara.asahi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

asparaclub went live in October 2004 as a members-only portal run by the Asahi Shimbun, one of the two enormous national dailies in Japan. Joining cost nothing and there was no annual fee. You filled in a form on the website, or you picked up a reply-paid postcard at an ASA, one of the neighborhood sales offices that put the paper through Japanese letterboxes every morning. What you got was a login attached to a newspaper, at a moment when newspapers everywhere had worked out they needed accounts and had not yet worked out what to charge for.

The site itself was columns, member offers, prize draws and reader features, the sort of material a paper produces easily and cannot sell separately. The part that makes it worth a grave is underneath that: asparaclub was an experiment in measuring print loyalty and paying it back in web privileges, built by people who still believed the print subscription was the real relationship and the site was the reward.

Turkish papers of the same years went the other way entirely. Hürriyet and Milliyet put their web editions out in the open and never once asked me whether anybody in the house took the paper, which is why I read Turkish newspapers on a 56k line for years without holding a single account with any of them. Ranking a reader by subscription history is a Japanese idea in a very specific sense: it assumes the household still takes the paper, every morning, from the same neighborhood sales office.

~ the record ~

~ the membership ladder ~

Every member had a color. Non-subscribers were White. Yellow meant you had been taking the Asahi at home for less than a year. Green meant a year or more, and Green members could use every service the club offered. The longer your household had been paying the delivery boy, the more of the website you were allowed into.

It is a strange mechanism to meet in 2004 and a very legible one. Loyalty programs did this everywhere, but they were selling air miles and coffee, not access to their own journalism. Asahi had the circulation to make it mean something, since a Green tier keyed to a paper selling roughly eight million copies a morning is not a small pool of people.

~ the funny part ~

The name is asparagus. The official explanation was that the club should grow quickly and stay fresh, the way asparagus does, and that it also carried the sense of making tomorrow a paradise of information. The catchphrase was あす、パラダイス, tomorrow, paradise, which is a pun holding the whole thing together: asu for tomorrow, para for paradise, and asparagus arriving out of the two of them.

~ how the merge worked ~

The announcement went up on the site on 10 September 2012. asparaclub would be integrated into Asahi Shimbun Digital, the paper's paid membership site, with the transfer work running progressively from 11 November and the club's own pages going dark on 25 November 2012. Its functions and prize campaigns were to continue over there, inside a product with a price on it.

Members who were not already Asahi Shimbun Digital subscribers were all converted into free registered accounts, which is the cleanest possible landing for a shutdown of this kind, except for one clause. The automatic conversion covered people who had signed up over the internet. If you had joined by postcard at your local sales office, you had to do the paperwork yourself.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »