마이엠 (MyM)

» see mym.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Six months. That is the whole thing. Plenus spent a year and a half building a Korean portal, opened it on 9 February 2004, and by the middle of August the company that had since bought Plenus was publishing a schedule for taking it apart. Yonhap ran a piece on 16 August under a headline that amounted to a record claim: shortest-lived site in the business. Twenty-two years later that is still what MyM is known for.

The plan was not unreasonable in the abstract. South Korea in 2004 had a portal market worth entering, with Naver and Daum established but the ground still moving, and Plenus was a serious company with a game business behind it. The launch pitch was storage. MyM gave every user a hundred megabytes of free email, and in February 2004 that number was startling enough to generate coverage on its own.

Then the ownership changed underneath it. In April 2004 CJ Internet, part of the CJ Group, acquired Plenus, and MyM came along with the purchase rather than as the point of it. What CJ wanted out of that deal was Netmarble, the game portal. A general-interest portal that had been open for two months and could not explain how it was different from Naver was the awkward extra item in the box.

~ the dossier ~

~ a hundred megabytes in February ~

To see why the mailbox was the headline, remember what the alternatives were that month. Hotmail's free tier was two megabytes. Yahoo's was four and would not move to a hundred until June. Gmail did not exist publicly until 1 April 2004, when Google announced a gigabyte and every other mail provider had to respond within the quarter. MyM shipped its hundred megabytes seven weeks before that announcement, which means for a short window it was one of the most generous free mailboxes anywhere.

I was at university in 2004, on a Turkish dial-up account, and the mailbox war is the part of that year I actually remember. A Gmail invite was something you asked around for on forums, and people traded them like they were worth money, because the storage number on the front page had suddenly become the thing you compared providers by. MyM was fighting that fight in a language I do not read, in a market I have never been in, and it lost in the same six months that Gmail spent winning it.

~ the adware ~

By summer the traffic was not arriving, and somebody at MyM decided to go and get it. The site distributed adware to users' machines with the aim of pushing its own numbers up, and Korean netizens noticed and reacted the way you would expect. Yonhap reported it in the same August piece that gave the site its shortest-lived record, which is a rough sentence to end up in: your growth trick and your death notice in one article.

~ Netmarble took the furniture ~

On 14 July 2004 CJ Internet said publicly that it would concentrate on running Netmarble, and the portal business was cut back from that day. The dismantling ran on a documented calendar. 13 August: the decision to phase out everything except the pieces worth folding into Netmarble, a list that included the movie section, the cartoons, the blogs, the photo gallery with its print-your-digital-camera-shots service, and two community products. 26 August: posting to boards was restricted. 31 August: search and news and most of the rest stopped. 4 October: the surviving services moved across to Netmarble. 12 November: the mail went off, and mym.net was finished.

The last of those dates is the one that matters to anyone who had signed up. A hundred megabytes of free storage, offered in February as the whole reason to switch, lasted until November.

~ the record ~

mym.net still resolves. It serves a single line of JavaScript that bounces you to a for-sale lander, the standard fate of a short domain with a memorable name. The Korean Wikipedia article is thorough about the timeline and cites eight or nine contemporary news stories, most of them from a three-week span in August 2004, which is roughly the amount of press a portal gets when the only interesting thing about it is how fast it closed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »