Joins Prime (조인스프라임)

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

~ the obit ~

joins.com still answers. It returns a page titled 서비스 종료 안내, service termination notice, carrying one line that thanks you for using a service which no longer exists and one button that sends you to joongang.co.kr. The last thing living at that address was Joins Prime, and it stopped on 30 June 2022.

Joins Prime was an all-you-can-read subscription to the JoongAng Ilbo group's magazines and papers. You paid once a month and the catalog was whatever the group had licensed, which ko.wikipedia puts at 126 titles across ten categories by March 2019. I have found no first-party launch notice for it, and the September 2016 start rests on that same article, so this grave takes the month and leaves the day alone.

The shutdown is better evidenced than the launch, which is a strange way round for a product to be documented. An October 2022 capture of the domain is headed 조인스프라임 종료 안내 and states that the service ended on 30 June 2022. That is the company's own text. What is absent from it, and from every piece of press I could reach, is any reason at all.

Korean paid-content products of this shape are hard to see from outside the language, and what makes this one legible is that the tombstone outlasted the product by years. Somebody at JoongAng kept paying for the domain and kept the notice served. The Last-Modified header on the version sitting there now reads August 2024.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the msn experiment ~

Before it was a magazine bundle, joins.com was a portal, and for nearly three years it was a portal with Microsoft's name on it. The JoongAng Ilbo and MSN Korea merged their operations on 15 October 2010 under the name 조인스MSN, a deal the Korean press trade described as modeled on Sankei's arrangement with MSN Japan. The launch had originally been set for that July and slipped after a new chief executive, hired out of NHN, aired doubts about the plan.

It came apart on 1 July 2013. The post mortem in 기자협회보 was that the merger never got past being a merger of companies. Members and email were never integrated, and traffic fell after Naver changed the way it surfaced news. Those are the assessments of people the trade press asked rather than a statement from either company.

The traffic figures are the hard numbers here. Korean Click had 조인스 at roughly 7 to 8 million weekly unique visitors through mid-2010, including 8.02 million in the week of 28 June. The combined 조인스MSN peaked at 8.58 million, in the week of the Yeonpyeong shelling. By early 2011 it was being outdrawn by the websites of the two big business dailies.

~ the newsstand ~

The turn away from the portal came on 22 September 2014, when 조인스 relaunched as a digital newsstand carrying 30 titles. It was free to members until the end of that October, and the plan to start charging slipped into early 2015 because the bundle pricing had not been settled.

That is the product Joins Prime grew out of two years later, and the comparison writes itself. Texture, the American version, was built by publishers for the same reason and absorbed by Apple in 2019. Two magazine industries on opposite sides of the Pacific tried to sell a library rather than an issue, and both attempts are in the ground.

~ the newspaper left first ~

On 21 August 2021 the JoongAng Ilbo rebuilt its homepage and cut the 더중앙 brand and the joongang.co.kr domain loose from 조인스닷컴 entirely. The stated goal was getting out from under Naver, on the strength of readers who logged in. That is why news.joins.com now redirects away, and it is why the old domain spent its last ten months holding nothing but a magazine subscription.

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