Daum Storyfunding

» see storyfunding.daum.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In September 2014 Daum started doing something that most portals talk about and almost none actually build: it let readers pay a journalist directly, before the piece existed, for a story the journalist wanted to write and no newsroom wanted to pay for. It was called Newsfunding. You pledged, the reporter worked, the instalments arrived on the portal where you already read the news.

The first year produced about 200 projects and 2.5 billion won. On 26 October 2015 Kakao announced the expansion: the same machinery opened to books, film, technology projects, anything a creator could describe and ask for money against, and the name changed to Storyfunding. Daum's news section had built a crowdfunding platform and then discovered it was not really about news.

The numbers Kakao published at the ceiling of it, in May 2017, are worth keeping. Over ten billion won in cumulative pledges. 296,512 backers. More than two thousand creators. An average of 8.53 million won per project, which in a country where a freelance feature paid a fraction of that is the entire argument for the model.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually funded ~

Kakao ran it as an editorial product rather than a marketplace, and partnered with outlets instead of competing with them: Kuki News had a Storyfunding channel, so did KBS, and Kakao ran one for its own class business. The pitch pages were long-form writing in their own right, with the creator explaining the project and then publishing the work in episodes as the money came in. That is closer to a serialized magazine than to a reward shop, and it is why the thing lived on a news domain instead of a commerce one.

It also carried the kind of work that needs money before an audience exists, the investigative reporting and the documentary shoots that cost months and return nothing until they are finished. The model's one real advantage over advertising is that it does not require the piece to be popular before it is written, only that some number of people want it to exist. Kakao even put on investigative journalism classes for people who wanted to use the platform and did not know how to report.

~ the day it died ~

Storyfunding ended on 24 April 2019. The page that replaced it is one screen: a heading reading 스토리펀딩 종료 안내, closure notice, then "the Storyfunding service ended on 24 April 2019", thanks to everyone who loved it, a promise that Kakao would repay them with better services in future, and a link to customer support. No reason was published. No successor was named. Peoplefunding, the recurring-support product Kakao had launched in January 2017, had already gone quiet.

There is one small tell in the markup. The stylesheet class that renders the farewell page is wrapped in a developer comment dated 2019-03-08, seven weeks before the service stopped. Somebody built the tombstone in early March and the site kept taking pledges until late April. That gap between when a company decides and when it tells you is normally invisible, and here it is sitting in the HTML with a date on it.

Korea kept crowdfunding. Tumblbug and Wadiz both outlived this, and both are reward-commerce platforms where you pre-order an object. The thing Storyfunding did, pay a writer for a story nobody has commissioned, went back to being something the industry agrees is a nice idea.

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