PaigeeWorld

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

~ the last words ~

Thirteen-year-olds who wanted to draw anime characters were a market that nobody serious was addressing in 2012, and PaigeeDraw had been serving it for years already with how-to-draw guides. The app came out of that. It shipped on iOS on 23 October 2012 as a tutorial product, teaching the proportions and the way the eyes are drawn, and the social network grew on top of it almost by accident, because every kid who finished a lesson wanted somebody to look at the result.

What it turned into was one of the largest English-language manga art communities on the web. Half a million App Store downloads by October 2014. An Android version after that. By May 2016 the company was putting out releases about having reached the top thousand websites in the United States with no advertising budget and no press, which is the kind of claim you check, and the traffic rankings of the period back it up. The growth was organic in the literal sense: children telling other children.

The operation that made it work was volunteer. A moderator corps, and a separate group called the Welcome Team whose job was greeting new members, which is a staffing decision that tells you the age of the user base more precisely than any demographic table would. The goodbye page claims PaigeeWorld was one of the safest and best moderated social networks in the world, and for a platform full of minors posting their own artwork that claim was the product.

~ the record ~

~ the number on the goodbye page ~

Most shutdown notices talk about journeys. This one does accounting in public. "We needed to raise $3500 / month to keep the lights on. To update and improve the community, we needed to raise $15,000 / month. We were not able to reach either goal." Then: "Without further financial support we are now forced to Power OFF PaigeeWorld."

Three and a half thousand dollars a month is less than one junior developer costs. It is the bill for some servers and some bandwidth, and a platform with a million registered accounts, twenty million uploaded drawings and 150,000 people logging in every month could not cover it. There was no acquisition and no investor bridge. A company that had kept the doors open for a decade on directors' and investors' money reached the end of that money, and the product went off.

The notice also thanks the moderators and the Welcome Team before it thanks anybody else, and it spends a paragraph on something unrelated to money. PaigeeWorld had always welcomed different beliefs and world views, it says, and it had stood up to bullies. That is the part a shutdown letter includes when the people writing it know their users are fourteen.

~ right click, repeat ~

The instructions for saving your own work are printed on the goodbye page as three numbered steps, and the third one is the whole problem: after logging on and opening your profile, "Right Click each image and save to your computer. Repeat until all images are saved."

There was no export button and no zip file waiting in your email. Twenty million drawings, most of them the first real artwork their authors had ever made, and the migration plan was a right-click per file for however many files you had posted over seven years. A teenager with six hundred uploads had six hundred right-clicks to do, in whatever window remained before the servers went off, and the notice is honest that the window was short.

~ not my crowd ~

Manga-drawing teenagers in North America were about as far from a thirty-year-old Turkish engineer's internet as it is possible to get, and I have no memory of this site at all. The reason it earns a stone anyway is the arithmetic, which travels: a community of a million people with a seven-year history and an active daily population died over a sum of money that a single mid-career salary covers twice a year. Nobody bought it, because there was nothing to buy. What it had was children's drawings and goodwill, and neither one shows up on a balance sheet.

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