Haivl

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

~ the obit ~

Haivl was Vietnam's biggest joke site: a feed of captioned images and short videos posted by its users, on the model of 9GAG. The name joins hài, Vietnamese for comedy, to a two-letter abbreviation of a vulgar slang intensifier. It began as a Facebook page called Appvl. Võ Thanh Quảng, a student at FPT University, turned the page into a website in 2012, and the company he set up for it, APPVL Vietnam Technology, received a social network license on 22 February 2013.

By October 2014 the site drew 37 million pageviews a month, according to VietNamNet. Its Facebook page had 4.4 million likes against fewer than 16,000 followers on Twitter, which is a fair picture of where Vietnamese users spent their time. Alexa ranked it 13th in Vietnam and 1,529th in the world. The money was real as well. The Vietnamese Wikipedia article gives average revenue of 800 million dong a month, and Saigoneer reported $37,654.

On 8 October 2014 24h Online Advertising, the company behind the portal 24h.com.vn, bought the site for 33 billion dong, about $1.55 million. Its general director Phan Minh Tâm told the press that "there are talented people behind Haivl and 24h will not intervene in their operations". Trương Gia Bình, the chairman of FPT Group, called the deal "a good one" and "an indication that young Vietnamese know how to do business on the Internet". Quảng was 25.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ sixteen days ~

On Friday 24 October 2014 Hoàng Vĩnh Bảo, head of the Bureau of Broadcasting and Electronic Information, signed a decision taking the license away from APPVL. The fine was 205 million dong, payable within ten days, and the withdrawal was permanent. Deputy Minister Trương Minh Tuấn said the decision reached the sale too, because the transfer of the licensed site had itself broken the law. The Alexa figures above are from that same day.

~ the three violations ~

The headline charge was content that distorted history and insulted national heroes, which the Vietnamese Wikipedia article quotes as a breach of "fine customs". The other two were licensing matters. The site had advertised an online game that was not yet approved, and it had offered chess games without permission.

The press then went looking for something heavier. Nguyễn Văn Hậu, vice chairman of the Ho Chi Minh City Jurists Association, told reporters that the owner could be prosecuted under Article 226 of the criminal code, on the illegal use of information on computer networks. The sources used here do not record a prosecution.

~ what 33 billion dong bought ~

The Vietnamese Wikipedia article says the site was "revived" under the name xem.vn, run by a company called MKO that it describes as an unofficial subsidiary of 24h. The newspaper Dân trí reported a second successor within days of the closure, which turned out to be an older site that had been copying Haivl's posts automatically all along.

The haivl.com address forwards to an online betting site today.

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