Osaifu.com (お財布.com)

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

~ the obit ~

Osaifu.com stopped at noon on Friday 31 January 2020. The notice its operator put up that day is still at the same address years later: three sentences of thanks signed by the Osaifu.com management office, sitting above an advertisement for a different point site owned by the same company. Very few shutdown notices in this collection can still be read on the live web rather than in an archive.

Opencube's own corporate history dates the beta to February 2004 and the full launch to that May, and the order of events is what makes it odd. The beta was running in February. The company was not incorporated until April, by which time the service it was being incorporated around had already signed up seventy thousand people. Two hundred thousand had registered by September. Opencube went on marking February as the birthday, holding a fifth-anniversary promotion in February 2009.

The domain took longer to arrive than the users did. Through all of this, osaifu.com itself was still serving registrar parking pages, VeriSign's and then Network Solutions', well into 2005, so the service must have spent its first year reachable at some other address. The oldest capture of the real homepage at osaifu.com is dated 16 July 2005, and its title bar translates to something like the magic wallet that fills up with money on the internet. High on that page sits an announcement that you could now use Osaifu.com on a PC too, followed immediately by a warning that some features were not available there yet. It had been built for a feature phone and the browser version was catching up.

What it sold was attention, and what it paid in was Osaifu Coin, where one coin was one yen. You earned them by clicking through to an advertiser and buying something, or by working through the surveys the site ran all day. The coins came out the other end as cash or as electronic money, and the list of destinations locates the whole business: WAON points, Rakuten Edy, nanaco points, T-Points, WebMoney. Those are domestic Japanese instruments, several of them tied to one supermarket chain or one convenience store. A site like this runs only where the points have somewhere to go, which is why the model stayed inside Japan while the plain affiliate link went everywhere.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ one coin, one yen ~

Ceres describes the mechanics plainly in its own annual report, because by then it was a listed company and had to. Points are funded out of a portion of the advertising fee the advertiser pays, and the registered member pays nothing at all to join. That is the entire trick. The advertiser buys a customer and the site keeps most of the fee, handing the customer back a slice of their own acquisition cost in a currency that is only worth anything once you convert it.

The rates were printed on the front page. In January 2019 Onward Closet was paying 4.0 percent back and Bic Camera 2.5 percent. Alongside those sat the quieter ways in, including a feature that paid you for photographing a shopping receipt and a browser toolbar that handed out thirty coins just for installing it.

~ the minigames ~

Under a heading meaning daily coins, the 2019 homepage listed twelve things to do, with a link to more. There was a typing drill. There was a farm. There was a mental arithmetic game called ANZAN, an English vocabulary test, a countdown timer, and a quiz whose entire premise was telling it which day of the week a given date had fallen on. Each one paid out some fraction of a yen.

That grid pins the product to its moment better than any screenshot could. It belongs to an era of small phone screens and metered connections, when a few minutes of arithmetic for a few yen was a trade some number of people made every morning. It was still on the front page in January 2019, just over a year before the site closed.

~ the thank-you note ~

The corporate timing is neater than it looks. Ceres was incorporated in January 2005 with ten million yen of capital and launched its own point site, Moppy, that May, which puts it within a couple of months of Osaifu.com. The two were contemporaries built by different people. In April 2015 Ceres acquired the Osaifu.com business outright from Opencube and spent the next few years running both. It had picked up a third point site, Mobatoku, along the way, and switched that one off at noon on 15 January 2019. Osaifu.com followed a year later.

No reason was published for either. What Ceres did publish was a schedule, and the schedule is the part worth reading. New registrations stopped on 13 November 2019, which is also the day the route to Moppy opened: you could move your account and your coins across, but only by going and doing it yourself. Advertising and content ended on 16 December. Then, on 24 December 2019, the ability to exchange coins for anything closed. From that afternoon a coin could be carried to Moppy or nothing, and the service itself stayed open another five and a half weeks, collecting nobody.

The notice at osaifu.com records that the service finished at noon on 31 January 2020 and thanks everyone who used it, then spends more words on Moppy than on the thing that just died, advertising seven million cumulative members and more than twenty ways to cash out. That seven million was already a year out of date when it was pasted in, and it has never been touched since. Moppy is still running. The page selling it to Osaifu.com's former users has now been up considerably longer than most of the sites in this archive managed to stay alive.

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