DMMブログ

» see blog.dmm.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Three weeks before the end, the front door of blog.dmm.co.jp was carrying two things at once. In a grey box at the top, the announcement: 「2017年6月30日（金）をもちまして、DMMブログはサービス終了とさせていただきます」. Under it, the standing pitch, unedited, promising official blogs from DMM's popular actresses and from the women working its chat rooms, with new ones going up all the time. The page in the browser tab was the obituary and the advertisement at the same time.

It had been running since April 2005, which is as far back as the site's own monthly archive pages reach. No launch announcement was ever published, not by DMM and not by anybody covering it, and the page was still going out in EUC-JP twelve years later. The first thing it ever asked you was your age. 当サイトは成人向けアダルトサイトです, this is an adult site, and anyone under eighteen was told to leave immediately, with a button for entering and a button for leaving.

It closed on a Friday. No official notice was ever placed on the individual blogs, so the only warning the service carried sat on that age gate, shown to readers on their way in. The writers worked it out regardless. On the last day the front page's list of new posts was still carrying 明日でDMMブログ終了やて from an actress blog, DMM Blog finishes tomorrow apparently, in Kansai dialect, and DMMブログが終わり！？ from a chat-room blog, which is the same news delivered as a question.

~ the record ~

~ who got to write ~

There was no sign-up form. By the end every blog sat under one of three paths on the domain, and the paths give away the whole arrangement. Performers were filed under actress and addressed by name, while the women working the chat rooms were filed under chatgirl and addressed by a six-digit number. The third path was kouhou, publicity, and it held the official blogs of the studios whose videos DMM sold, filed under brand names.

What a visitor got was the reading side of a blog platform, posts and a comment box, with the account that produces posts permanently out of reach.

That arrangement is what makes the service odd rather than merely obscure. A blog host normally dies and leaves a crowd of people who have lost their work. This one died and left a crowd of people who had lost their reading.

~ the slow emptying ~

DMM never published a figure for anything here, so the only measure available is how much of the site the Internet Archive managed to keep. Counted that way, by distinct monthly archive pages per year, the service fills up across the late 2000s and peaks in 2009 at a couple of thousand. After that it falls off every single year without exception. By 2016 the count is in the teens, and 2017 has exactly one.

That is a proxy for crawler attention as much as for activity, so it should not be read as a census. The shape of it is still hard to mistake. Whatever DMM switched off in June 2017 had been emptying out for the better part of ten years, and the meta description was still saying 新着ブログ続々追加中, new blogs being added one after another, right up to the gate going dark.

~ what the notice thanked ~

There were two notices and they do not agree about tense. The one on the age gate, up at least three weeks early, says the service will end on Friday 30 June and thanks people for 長きに渡りご愛読, their long readership. The one inside, on the final capture of the top page, taken at 21:29 Japan time on 30 June itself, is already looking back: 2017年6月30日をもちまして DMMブログ は終了いたしました. It was over before the day was.

Neither of them offers a cause. Nothing about costs and nothing about a successor. The inside notice thanks you twice instead, once for using the service and once for your patronage, and then stops.

Nothing in either notice reaches for the verbs a blog service uses when it is handing writing on to somebody else. No export, no partner host. The posts simply stopped being served.

~ ten days to a 404 ~

The site did not linger. Pages that had been answering normally on the last day were gone within about a week and a half, and by then every path on the domain was collapsing into the same error page, a little over a kilobyte long. The subdomain stopped resolving at some point after that.

Twelve years of posts and the comment threads under them, compressed into one shared 404 inside ten days. The last thing the top page ever said was thank you, already in the past tense, two and a half hours before the day it named was over.

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