Jaeminara (재미나라)

» see jaeminara.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Jaeminara opened in March 2000. The name means roughly "fun country," and it was the website of Hansol Education, one of the Korean publishers that sells structured home study materials to parents of small children. That business model matters for understanding the site: Hansol's actual product was paper, the workbooks and reading sets that arrive at the house on a subscription, and Jaeminara was the screen attached to it. Games and songs for children young enough that a parent was sitting beside them.

It worked well enough to become a minor fixture of Korean children's media rather than just a publisher's marketing site. By February 2008 it had passed 3.5 million registered members, which in a country of about 48 million people at the time means a large share of a generation of Korean kids had an account. Its content crossed onto broadcast television twice, which is the part that surprised me: material from the site turned up on MBC's Sunday-night variety flagship in 2004 through the quiz segment Brain Survivor, and again in 2007 on Ppopopo, the long-running MBC children's program.

I turned 16 in 2000, which puts me on exactly the wrong side of this one. Jaeminara's audience was preschool and early elementary, in Korean, sold to Korean parents as an accessory to a paper subscription. There is no angle from which it was ever going to reach a Turkish teenager with a 56k modem, and the honest position is that I came to it through a shutdown record rather than any memory.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the tadpole song ~

The site's one genuine cultural hit came in 2004 from a rhythm game called Rhythm GoGo, and specifically from its version of 올챙이와 개구리, "The Tadpole and the Frog," a Korean children's song about a tadpole growing legs. Korean records of the site describe it as a 열풍, a craze, which is a strong word to attach to a publisher's web game.

This was the Flash era doing what Flash did best. A song every Korean child already knew, wired to arrow keys, running in a browser on a shared family computer with no install and no payment. Hansol was selling workbooks and accidentally shipped a hit single's worth of cultural memory.

~ seventeen years ~

The interesting thing about Jaeminara is not how it died but how long it took. A publisher's Flash play-site peaking in 2004 and 2008 should have been switched off around 2012, when Flash went into its long decline and the children it was built for had moved onto phones. Instead it ran until the middle of 2017, nine years past its membership peak and well past the point where it was selling anything for Hansol.

That is what a corporate web property looks like when nobody has a reason to kill it. The hosting cost is a rounding error against a publishing company's revenue, and no single person owns the decision to end it. So it sits there, serving a shrinking number of children an increasingly broken set of Flash games, for seventeen years.

~ the forward ~

The closing was set for 30 June 2017, but Korean records note the site was still reachable until 3 July, so the date on this grave is the day access actually stopped rather than the day the notice named. Hansol did not take everything down at once. The main homepage went first and the remaining links lingered for months, and by October 2017 the rest had been closed and pointed at Hansol Education's own front page. Some of the catalog was later loaded into Hansol's Hangeul-learning product.

That redirect is still in place. Requesting jaeminara.co.kr today returns a 301 to eduhansol.com, the parent company's site, which is the most common tombstone shape there is: the brand is gone, and the leftover traffic gets swept into whatever the company sells now.

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