PopJam

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

~ the eulogy ~

The age range was seven to twelve, which is the hardest audience on the internet to build for and the one with the least choice. PopJam was a feed where children posted their own drawings and photographs decorated with stickers, and other children commented underneath, all of it moderated before it went up. It ran on phones and tablets only. There was no desktop version and no public web profile to be found by a search engine.

Mind Candy built it in London in 2014. The studio was coming off Moshi Monsters, which had been one of the largest children's properties in the world and was by then draining away as the web moved off Flash and onto phones. PopJam was the mobile bet, live by September 2014, with animated stickers arriving a week after TechCrunch first wrote it up.

I was thirty when this launched and an engineer with no children on it, so my distance here is simple arithmetic. What makes it worth a grave is not the product. It is that nine years of drawings by people who were eight years old when they made them were held by three companies in sequence and then switched off on a Wednesday morning.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

Every piece of safety engineering in a kids' app is a cost that the equivalent adult app does not carry. Posts went through moderation. Accounts were built around the consent rules that apply to under-13s, which in the United States means COPPA and in Europe means a parent in the loop. SuperAwesome, which bought PopJam, had built an entire business on exactly that plumbing, selling it to other developers as Kids Web Services.

In December 2016 the company turned the feed itself into a product. The PopJam Platform let any developer drop a moderated, kid-legal social feed into their own app rather than build the moderation stack from scratch. The app was by then partly a showroom for the compliance machinery underneath it.

~ the handover ~

Mind Candy sold PopJam to SuperAwesome in September 2015, terms undisclosed, with more than a million UK users on it. Dylan Collins, running SuperAwesome out of London, talked about connecting those kids to the quarter of a billion monthly users his ad platform already touched.

Five years later Epic Games bought SuperAwesome outright, announced on 25 September 2020, with the company left to run as a standalone. Fortnite's owner had an obvious reason to want the best under-13 consent infrastructure in the business, and that infrastructure was Kids Web Services. A moderated drawing app for primary-school children was a small line item on the same balance sheet.

~ the last morning ~

The notice called itself a bittersweet announcement. PopJam would close on 8 March 2023 at 10am GMT, with the people and the budget going to Game With Me and other Epic and SuperAwesome products. The post pointed at Zigazoo and LEGO Life as places that now existed for kids, which was true and which is also the standard shape of a shutdown note in 2023.

PopJammers, the house word for the users, could download their art inside the app until 7 March and request it from customer services until 7 May. Everything that was not pulled out in that window is gone, because the privacy rules that made PopJam careful with children's data are the same rules that make keeping a dead archive of it impossible. The safest thing you can do with nine years of children's drawings is delete them.

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