夠Yeah (Goyeah)

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

~ the obit ~

In 2006 a man on a Hong Kong bus was filmed shouting at the passenger behind him, the clip went everywhere, and a city that had not really watched video on the internet started doing it constantly. Most of what it watched was pirated. Sharon Cheung, a broadcast journalist who had moved into business, looked at that and drew an unusual conclusion for 2006: the rights holders should be putting the same material online themselves, free, before somebody else made the habit permanent.

She took the idea to Peter Lam, joined his Forefront Group as a senior vice president in June 2007, and got eighteen months to build it. Hong Kong universities turned out to have almost nobody who knew streaming technology, so the engineering team was hired on the mainland, more than forty people. Inside Forefront there was an argument about whether users should pay. The free side won.

Goyeah went into testing in March 2009 with films from Media Asia, opened publicly on 20 September, and came out of the gate with roughly three hundred hours of programming and a shelf of celebrity games. Focus group members had been run through the site as ordinary users beforehand, which is how it lost the dedicated desktop player it originally shipped with and got browser playback instead. In the first two weeks it did close to a million page views.

By June 2011 the membership figure was around 140,000, concentrated in the 17 to 25 bracket, and the site had touched 230 in Hong Kong's Alexa ranking. Cheung said in 2014 that it had made a little money. That is the highest claim anybody ever made for it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ where the films came from ~

Hong Kong producers were conservative about handing a website their catalog, and the thing that made Goyeah possible was corporate adjacency rather than persuasion. Media Asia sat under the same Lai Sun umbrella as Forefront, which is how a startup got the Infernal Affairs films and Initial D on day one. Cheung noted at the time that non-Hong Kong studios were friendlier to the concept and would license to her more cheaply than the local ones would.

The anime side was the part that got word of mouth. Japanese series ran with Chinese subtitles and without the cuts broadcast television made for content standards, which was a genuine draw in a market where the televised versions were visibly trimmed. Video was H.264 at 720 by 480, which in 2009 was a defensible number and by 2013 was not.

~ the celebrity layer ~

The half of the site that was not video was stranger and more Hong Kong than anything a Western video startup was building. Games were made around specific stars under license: a beatbox composition toy built on clips of the duo Fama, a dress-up game fronted by Angelababy that reached iOS in March 2010, a romance game called 明心奇緣Online with Huang Xiaoming, where the fifty highest-scoring players were taken to meet him in December 2009.

Original programming followed the same instinct. A cheap-eats show where the host had to find a meal under fifty dollars. Hong Kong's first online reality series, which put single women in their twenties through styling coaching. A political segment in December 2011 where the columnist Chip Tsao put reader questions to Henry Tang while he was running for Chief Executive. Cheung started posting her own current-affairs vlogs in 2013, which is early for that format anywhere.

The films it carried reached me the way Hong Kong cinema reached most of Turkey, through DVDs and downloads with the studio nowhere in the transaction. The service that was trying to fix exactly that problem was Cantonese, Hong Kong only, and invisible from here. I have watched Infernal Affairs. I had never heard the word Goyeah before writing this.

~ suing the newspaper ~

In 2010 Goyeah handed its advertising sales to Apple Daily on a sixty-forty split of the revenue. The following year it said the paper had unilaterally walked away from the arrangement, and in May 2011 the Lai Sun side went to court over an alleged breach, chasing about HK$3.6 million. A free video site whose only income was advertising had outsourced the selling of that advertising to a newspaper, and then had to sue the newspaper. There is no public record of how it ended.

~ how it went dark ~

Cheung left around July 2015. After that there is no announcement, no farewell post and no trade coverage of a closure, which for a site with a six-year run and a famous founder is its own kind of statement about how much anybody was still watching. The dating comes from the Internet Archive: a working front page captured on 5 February 2015, and a capture on 6 February 2016 that says the domain name has expired.

goyeah.com answers today. It is a for-sale page on a parking service, dark blue, with a line offering to find you information and relevant links for goyeah.com.

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