Marumaru

» see marumaru.in as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Marumaru sits in the part of internet history i can read about but cannot remember. It ran in Korean, for readers of Japanese comics translated into Korean, during years when i was a working engineer in Ankara with no reason to be anywhere near it. The mechanics, on the other hand, are the same mechanics every country's piracy scene ends up with, and those i recognize.

It opened in June 2013 and grew into the largest illegal manga site in South Korea. At its height it was pulling more daily traffic than Nate, one of the country's established portals, which is a strange sentence to write about a site with no company behind it and no address that stayed the same for long.

The important design decision was that Marumaru held almost nothing. It was a link site. The scans and the translations lived on separate hosts, and Marumaru was the index that told you where to look, which kept the visible operation small enough to move. When a domain got blocked the whole thing reappeared somewhere else within days, and readers followed because the index was the only part that was hard to rebuild.

By the end the catalog behind it ran to something like 42,000 works. Korean prosecutors put the advertising revenue at a minimum of 1.2 billion won, while press reports circulated a figure closer to eight billion. Whichever number is right, the site was a business, and the people running it were reported to be living in the United States.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

Korean readers had an appetite for Japanese manga that legal channels served slowly and partially. Marumaru filled the gap the way these sites always do, by being free and having everything on the day it came out, and the translations were done by unpaid people who wanted the chapter to exist in their language more than they wanted to be paid for it.

2018 was the year the tolerance ran out on both sides of the sea. Japan spent that spring dismantling Mangamura, which went dark in April after direct pressure from the government. Korea spent the year going after its own, and by December the police had closed 25 sites for infringing on cultural content.

~ the day it died ~

In July 2018 a Busan court convicted the 43-year-old programmer who ran Bamtoki, a competing manga site, and gave him two and a half years. That was the signal. Preliminary investigations into Marumaru were already open.

The last update went up on 18 November 2018. From the evening of the nineteenth the servers were unstable, and from the small hours of the twentieth nobody could reach it from inside Korea or outside. What visitors got was a notice claiming maintenance was underway and asking them to check back later, which is the traditional last words of a site that has decided not to come back.

~ the long tail ~

The takedown was real and the effect was temporary. Successor sites were running within months under different names, because a link index costs almost nothing to build and the scanlation groups that produced the material were never part of the site that indexed it. The legal Korean webtoon industry grew enormously over the following years, which did more damage to the piracy habit than the arrests did.

The operators were still being pursued after the site went down, and the case moved slowly because of where they lived. Marumaru itself never returned. Its name survives mostly in the block lists of Korean ISPs and in the search history of people who once knew which mirror was current this week.

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