ジャンプLIVE (Jump LIVE)

» see shonenjump.com/jumplive as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Shueisha put ジャンプLIVE on the App Store and Google Play on 1 August 2013 and called it an 増刊, a special edition of Weekly Shonen Jump, which is the same word the company uses for a paper magazine you buy at a station kiosk. Reading was mostly free. A pass cost 250 yen and unlocked the rest. The team behind it was a mixed unit pulled out of the Jump editorial department and the digital business division, working under a name that translates roughly as the planning room.

Issue one ran about 1,500 newly drawn pages on top of roughly 2,000 pages of reruns, which comes to 3,500 pages of comics, and the comics were not all of it. There were Flash animations and a cooking video series in which Hirohiko Araki and Yusei Matsui made pasta. Sui Ishida serialized a six-chapter Tokyo Ghoul side story, 325 pages of it. ONE and Yusuke Murata sent over a One-Punch Man guest chapter.

It found readers fast: 300,000 downloads in the first fifteen days and 400,000 by December. A survey that October put the audience at about seventy percent male and slightly younger than the print magazine's, and the editors were openly hoping to reach the over-thirty reader who had stopped buying Jump on paper years earlier and now carried a smartphone. The app lost money, which nobody at Shueisha had expected it not to do.

~ the dossier ~

~ two issues and no third ~

The second issue shipped on 20 December 2013. Shuhei Hosono, the editor running the project, told interviewers he wanted a third out in the first half of 2014. It never appeared, and his account of why is unusually blunt for a publisher talking about its own failure: each issue carried so much material that the editorial department itself could not get through it, and mixing free and paid content inside one package left readers unsure what they were looking at. DeNA launched Manga Box that same December, and the ground under the whole category moved within months.

None of this was reachable from Ankara without a Japanese App Store account, and the entire run lasted sixteen weeks. By the time the name traveled at all, what it described had already been folded into the app that actually made Shueisha's digital reputation.

~ what replaced it ~

In March 2014 the Jump editorial department started building the successor, and on 22 September 2014 少年ジャンプ+ launched. It kept the digital-native ambition and threw away the magazine-issue packaging: continuous serialization and a clear free tier, with the weekly magazine itself sold inside the same app.

Nine LIVE titles crossed to Jump+ directly, among them Akira Amano's ēlDLIVE and Kuraku's 猫田びより. Three more were promoted to serialization in the paper magazine, including 学糾法廷, which was redrawn for print by Takeshi Obata. As of late 2019, exactly one of the alumni was still running anywhere.

~ the page that never came down ~

shonenjump.com/jumplive/ still answers. It is the app's own promotional page from 2014 with a notice pasted across the top saying the service stopped at 08:30 on Monday 22 September 2014 and pointing readers at 少年ジャンプ+.

The notice sets out the rules of the afterlife carefully. If you already had the app installed you could keep reading what was in it, and if you had bought a pass you could still pull down the paid works, but there were no new installs and no new pass purchases, and deleting the app was permanent. A support address and its opening hours, weekdays 10:00 to 18:00, are still printed at the bottom. Almost every account of ジャンプLIVE says the app quietly stopped and that nobody announced an ending. The announcement has been sitting on its own website for twelve years, down to the minute.

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