Minpos (みんぽす)

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

~ the eulogy ~

みんぽす was short for みんなのポスト, everybody's post, and it opened on 15 June 2007 as a site for word-of-mouth writing about digital consumer electronics. WillVii, the company behind it, had been incorporated five months earlier on 11 January 2007. On the surface it was a review site with a social bookmarking layer, which in 2007 was the most ordinary thing a Japanese startup could build.

The part that was not ordinary came a few months later. WillVii started lending the hardware out. If you were an approved blogger you could borrow a camera you could not afford and keep it for anything from one month to six. Then you wrote about it and sent it back. The loans were free and no fee went in either direction.

By March 2008 the site was reported to be carrying more than forty thousand reviews, and by July 2010 the pool of equipment out on loan was valued at around a hundred million yen. CNET Networks Japan partnered with WillVii to run joint features with its reviewers. For a few years in the late 2000s this was a functioning alternative to the press-sample system, run from outside the press.

~ the dossier ~

~ monofellows ~

Borrowing was not open to everyone. WillVii certified a pool of bloggers it called モノフェローズ, roughly "thing fellows", and certification meant being interviewed face to face first. You did not sign up through a form and get a camera in the post. Somebody at the company met you, decided your writing was worth a loan out of somebody else's inventory, and put you on the list.

That vetting is the whole reason the model held together. A manufacturer handing out review units has no leverage once the unit is gone, and a platform handing them out to anyone has no quality floor. Meeting the person first dealt with both at once, for the price of an afternoon.

~ the rules ~

Two obligations came attached to every loan. The review had to be published within a month, and it had to state on its face that the hardware was on loan from みんぽす. Underneath both sat the condition that made them enforceable: when the period ended the equipment went back, every time, with no option to buy it out.

Set that beside what the English-speaking web was doing with sponsored posts in the same years and it reads like a different industry. Japan built a disclosure norm into the mechanics and then enforced it with the simplest lever available, which is that the thing you are reviewing is not yours. I was in Ankara reading Turkish hardware forums through all of this, where the review culture ran instead on people who had bought the part with their own money and had strong opinions about the shop that sold it to them.

~ the sign-off ~

WillVii renamed itself Tokyo Camera Club in March 2017, which is why the tombstone on a gadget-lending site is signed by a photography company. The service itself lasted another two years.

On 29 July 2019 みんぽす closed. The notice is one paragraph long: 「2019年7月29日をもちまして、「みんぽす」はサービスを終了いたしました。長年のご愛顧誠にありがとうございました。」 Service ended, thank you for your long patronage. No reason is given anywhere on the page. Every other path on the host collapses into that one 2,960-byte file, which is still answering at www.minpos.com over unencrypted http in 2026, seven years after the last camera went back.

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