Paran

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

~ the goodbye ~

The first time paran registered with me was while i was reading about Hitel, years after both of them were gone. Korea ran an entire PC communication era in parallel with the one i was in, on services i had no way of touching from a modem in Turkey, and paran is what happened when the company holding that user base tried to walk it onto the web. There is nothing here for me to remember, so this is written off the record.

KTH launched it on 17 July 2004. The company was Korea Telecom's internet subsidiary, and until shortly before this it had been called KT Hitel, after the dial-up service it ran. Paran was assembled out of two things KT already owned: Hitel, the PC communication service, and Hanmir, a search portal that had never really landed. The launch was fronted by a national advertising campaign, and the strategy behind it was that a telco with a subscriber list already in hand should be able to buy its way into a market that Naver and Daum had spent the previous five years dividing between them.

It did not work, and the reason it did not work is that portal loyalty in Korea had already hardened. Naver's Jisik-iN had made search a place where people went for answers written by other Koreans rather than for links, and Daum had the mail addresses and the cafes. Paran spent eight years being the third option in a two-option market, which is an expensive place to stand.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually shipped ~

Paran was not a coasting product, which is part of what makes it worth writing down. In December 2006 it launched what it called gigamail, the first mailbox in Korea to hand out a full gigabyte, at a point when the competition was still rationing megabytes. It ran Jisikbada as its answer to knowledge search, carried webcomics including Sikgaek, and kept iDisk and U2 alive out of the Hitel inheritance for the people who still wanted them.

None of that moved the ranking. The lesson buried in paran is that shipping the better feature does not get you the users when the users already have somewhere to be, and a gigabyte of free mail in 2006 was a genuinely better feature.

~ the long tail ~

Daum agreed to buy Paran Co. from KTH on 15 June 2012, and the closure was announced the same week for the end of July. The site went dark after midnight on 31 July 2012. Mail accounts were offered a migration to Daum's Hanmail and blogs were offered a migration to Tistory, with a backup window that stayed open until 4 October. KTH used the shutdown as the occasion to announce it was done with portals and was now a mobile company.

The detail that gets missed is which addresses died that day. Paran carried mail on three domains, and one of them was hitel.net. The Hitel dial-up service had already ended years earlier, but the address survived inside paran the way old addresses do, and 31 July 2012 is the day it actually stopped. A portal that never beat anybody turned out to be the last thing holding the door open for a service that had.

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