Entoi

~ the goodbye ~

Korea in 2003 was running an internet two generations ahead of the one I was sitting in. I was a university student in Ankara that year, on MSN, with broadband at home still a couple of years away. A site that paid you a virtual currency for having readers would have sounded like something out of a magazine article about the future. It was not. It was the third product of one of the biggest internet companies in the country.

NHN started planning it in June 2002 with five people and had a hundred on the team by the time it launched on 2 September 2003. Entoi was positioned next to Naver and Hangame, which is to say next to a search engine that would end up owning Korean search and a game portal already printing money. The beta had produced around 30,000 blogs before the doors opened. On 9 September, one week in, ten thousand people registered in a single day.

The mechanic was called the star and fan system. Everyone signed up as a pre-star. Cross a hundred followers and the site officially made you a star, at which point the currency started running toward you instead of away from you. NHN pitched this as C2C monetization while everyone else was still selling things directly to users, and it is close to what the creator economy arrived at a decade later with much better tooling behind it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the currency ~

The money was called Uyu and it was counted in cc, as in cubic centimeters. Registering got you 50,000 of them and logging in got you another hundred a day, and anything bought in the marketplace refunded half its price back in Uyu. You spent it by visiting a star's blog or copying one of their posts, so reading was the transaction and being read was the income.

Stars could bid their balance in the Uyu Auction. In December 2003 the lot was a Volkswagen New Beetle valued at thirty million won, and that is where the Korean press turned on it. Entoi's users were mostly teenagers with no money of their own, and a car auction settled in a currency teenagers earned by being popular was not a hard target to hit.

~ why it fell over ~

The numbers went up first. September 2003 averaged around 60,000 unique visitors a day and put Entoi second in the Korean blogging market. Opening week drew 1.14 million weekly visitors. A month after that it was 320,000, and by late October it had climbed back to 1.26 million. In early December the weekly figure still held at 1.19 million while page views sat at 14.82 million, roughly half of opening week, which is what it looks like when people keep arriving and stop staying.

The reason is in the design. A star system needs stars, and a hundred followers is a lot to ask of a fifteen year old with no particular gift for writing. The people who actually cleared the bar were mostly the ones who already had an audience somewhere else, so the bulk of the population sat permanently on the paying side of an arrangement they had joined to be on the earning side of.

~ what came after ~

NHN announced the closure on 2 December 2004 and turned the service off on 9 December, with 800,000 registered accounts on the books. Migration into Hangame stayed open until January 2005, and Toy Hompy, the personal homepage feature, carried on there as Hangame Hompy. Everything else went into Hangame's community section and stopped being a product with its own name.

Korean personal publishing went to Cyworld instead, with a minihompy and a currency of its own in the form of acorns, and Cyworld never asked you to be a star before it would let you earn them. That is the whole difference between the two. Entoi built an economy that required most of its participants to lose, and Cyworld built one where you bought wallpaper for a little room. The thing Entoi was actually reaching for turned up again around 2015 with different names on it and advertisers paying the bill.

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