Otamart (オタマート)

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

~ the obit ~

Otamart opened on Monday 24 March 2014, built by jig.jp, and the launch release spelled it in lowercase as otamart. It was a flea-market app with one restriction written into the product: you could only sell otaku goods. Not a category filter you could switch off, not a section of a bigger marketplace. The whole app was the restriction.

The restriction is what gave it features nobody else needed. 専用出品 let you reserve a listing for one named buyer, so a negotiation held in the comments could be closed without a stranger sniping it. Browsing ran on tags instead of categories, because merchandise is organized by series and character rather than by shelf. An age gate sat in front of R18 listings, an escrow held the buyer's money until the item arrived, and there were contests for 痛バッグ, the bags fans cover in badges of a single character. A mascot called 小田まこ, drawn by the illustrator pako, sat on the front of it. The fee was ten percent from March 2015.

Only one number was ever published about its size: more than 7,000 items handled per day, stated in March 2015. That is the whole public record of how big it got. Across its entire life nobody released a download count or a member count, and no transaction value was ever put on it. The picture IDs on its image server climbed past twenty-nine million by July 2021, which is tempting and useless, because an ID sequence counts the numbers issued and not the things that exist.

A flea market runs on shared recognition. You have to already know what the thing is before you can want it, and every listing here assumed you could name the character on the badge. I could not name one of them, which is a cleaner statement of my distance from this than geography would be.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the survey nobody expected ~

In June 2014, three months in, the app surveyed its own users and got 1,564 answers back. The result inverts what an auction site of that era looked like. 75.7 percent were women. 49 percent were aged fifteen to nineteen, with teenagers somewhere around sixty percent of the whole base, and 89 percent described themselves as otaku. The secondhand merchandise economy in Japan was mostly teenage girls, and the app that noticed first got them.

It spent money accordingly. There were television commercials with voice actors in them, in 2016 and again in 2020, and the app turned up in the sponsor list for Animelo Summer Live, which is about as inside as advertising gets in that world.

~ the quiet change of owner ~

In April 2016 jig.jp bought every share of a company called A Inc. In March 2017 it moved its consumer products into it, Otamart among them, along with the live-streaming service ふわっち. The handover shows up in the footer and almost nowhere else: captures through 31 March 2017 read Copyright © 2014 jig.jp, and from 3 June 2017 they read Copyright (c) 2014 A Inc.

Somewhere in that window the homepage carried a notice titled 「オタマートの運営会社が変わりました」, the operating company has changed. Its body was never archived, so what it said is gone. jig.jp's own corporate history skips the transfer entirely, and ふわっち, the part of that business that was not Otamart, is still running today.

~ two hours after the switch ~

The end was announced on 30 June 2021 and run as a schedule with the clock written into every line. New listings and new registrations stopped at 14:00 on 15 July. Buying and paying stopped at 14:00 on 30 July, and so, unusually, did item search and browsing, which left four weeks where the app existed and could not be looked at. Service ended at 14:00 on 26 August. Point refunds had to be claimed by 23:59 on 31 October and were paid on 5 November, and the last day to take your money out and the last day you could log in were the same, 30 November.

There is a tombstone written in the past tense, captured at 16:01 JST on the day itself, two hours after the switch: 「8月26日(木) 14:00 をもちましてオタマートのサービスを終了し」. Ten days before that, a separate notice had widened the pool of refundable points, and the change was quietly folded back into the original announcement, so the June version and the September version of the same page do not say the same thing.

No reason was given on any of them. The announcement thanks you, the FAQ runs to six pages of mechanics, and neither contains a why.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »