NAVER Matome

» see matome.naver.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

you have hit a page like this without knowing what you were looking at. you search for something in a language you cannot read, and the top result is not a source. it is a collection. twenty links and a stack of pictures somebody assembled about the topic, wrapped in advertising, sitting above the people who made the pictures. in Japan, for about a decade, that page was almost always NAVER Matome.

NAVER is the Korean search company, and it came into Japan in 2009 through a subsidiary that later became NHN Japan and then LINE. Matome opened on 1 july 2009 on a reasonable premise: a crawler cannot rank human judgment, so let humans do the ranking and publish the result. a matome is a summary, a gathering-up. you picked a subject, pulled together the useful links and images, wrote a line under each, and published the page.

in november 2009 the incentive program arrived and changed what the site was. contributors began earning a share of the ad revenue according to how many people read their pages. that single decision took a hobby and made it a job, and once it was a job the volume went vertical.

i cannot read Japanese, so Matome only ever reached me the way a wall reaches you. but the shape was familiar from the outside, because every language eventually grew one of these: a layer of aggregation that outranks the thing it aggregates, funded by the same ads the original was trying to sell.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the incentive ~

paying by the pageview selects for exactly what you would expect. speed over sourcing, trending subjects over useful ones, and a class of anonymous contributors who watched what Japan was searching for and had a page up about it before lunch. the pages were long because length caught more search terms, and thin because thinking is slow.

it worked commercially. NAVER shut its own Japanese search engine down in december 2013 and told everyone the company would concentrate on LINE and on Matome instead, which tells you which of its products was actually carrying weight. by the middle of the decade you could not search a consumer question in Japanese without one of these pages in the first few results.

~ what it took from other people ~

photographers found their photos on matome pages. bloggers found their paragraphs. the platform's position was that users were responsible for what they posted, which is the position every platform of that era took, and the complaints never stopped arriving.

the reckoning came from next door. in late 2016 DeNA pulled down WELQ, its medical curation site, after it turned out to be full of copied and dangerously wrong health advice, and dragged its other curation properties offline with it. that scandal made the whole Japanese curation-media model a liability in one season. Matome was older and bigger and survived it, but the model it had proven was now the model everybody had questions about.

~ the day it died ~

LINE announced the shutdown on 1 july 2020, exactly eleven years after the launch, citing changes in the market and a decision to concentrate the group's effort elsewhere. new accounts stopped on 31 july. the site went dark around midday on 30 september 2020. downloads of your own pages stayed open until 30 november, and the last incentive payments cleared on 16 february 2021, which is a tidier ending than most services manage.

on the way out the site published its own numbers as a final matome, up for twenty-four hours: 171.8 billion page views over eleven years. Archive Team went in and grabbed what it could. everything Japan had collected about itself, held in a place that was never the source of any of it, and none of the sources got a copy back.

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