U17

» see u17.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

China ran an entire comics industry on sites I have never held an account on. The language is the first wall and the app store is the second one, and by the time anything that started on u17 reached me it had been through an animation studio and somebody else's subtitle track. The platform underneath was invisible from here, the way a printing house is invisible from a bookshop.

The site began in 2006 as a fan community and turned into a business on 15 October 2009, in Shanghai, with Shanda money behind it. The pitch was in the name it used on its own front page, 有妖气原创漫画梦工厂, the original comics dream factory. Anyone could open a serial. Readers voted with clicks and the ranking pages decided which unknown would still be updating next month.

It worked better than anyone expected. By 2012 the site was counting eight million clicks a day, and by 2015 it had more than seven million registered accounts and over forty five thousand original comics on its shelves. Chinese comics had spent two decades as the weaker cousin of imported manga. U17 was the first place where a local amateur could build a readership without a publisher agreeing to it first.

~ the record ~

~ what it made ~

The catalog produced the properties that everything downstream fed on. 十万个冷笑话 started there as a gag strip, became an animated series and then a feature film. 镇魂街 and 雏蜂 went the same route, into animation and live action and games. For a stretch around 2014 and 2015, if a Chinese animation studio announced an adaptation, the odds were decent that the source had been serialized on u17 by someone who was not a professional when they started.

That is also what made the site worth buying rather than worth running. A platform full of amateur serials is a slow business. A rights library assembled from those serials is an asset that can be moved.

~ the price of it ~

In August 2015 Aofei Entertainment, a toy and animation company, bought all of u17 for 904 million yuan, split between 328 million in shares and 576 million in cash. It was one of the loudest numbers of that year's rush into Chinese animation, and it came at the top of the market.

On 19 November 2021, Aofei announced it was selling the whole thing to Bilibili for 600 million yuan. Six years of ownership and a third of the price gone. By then the reading had moved to phone apps with vertical scroll and paid chapters, a format u17's desktop-shaped catalog was never built for, and Bilibili was buying a library rather than a website.

~ what really happened ~

The migration came before the announcement, which is the polite order to do it in. From June 2022 u17 asked users to bind their account to a Bilibili Comics account and move their purchases across with one click, with small gifts attached for anyone who did it early. On 1 September the official Weibo account confirmed what everyone had worked out, that the site would close on 31 December.

It closed on the day it said it would. The catalog is inside Bilibili Comics now, which is a better outcome than deletion and still not the same thing as the site existing. What ended was the open door: the part where anyone could start serializing tomorrow and let the ranking page decide whether they were any good.

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