VeryCD

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

~ the eulogy ~

i ran eMule for years, so i knew the network VeryCD sat on top of. What i never saw was VeryCD itself, because it was in Chinese and it was for China. The eD2k links i clicked in Turkey got passed around on MSN or dug out of forums. In China, the place you went to find them was this one site, an index so large and so well kept that for a lot of people it simply was the eDonkey network, the way a search box can become the whole internet.

so this is told across a language wall. VeryCD started in September 2003 as the personal site of a young Shanghai developer named Huang Yimeng. The story that gets retold is that it began as his own project and stayed running on money the readers pooled to buy servers, which tells you how much it mattered to the people who used it before it was ever a company. It indexed eD2k links, the addresses eMule used, and it wrapped the whole thing in its own bundled version of the client so a newcomer could install one program and start pulling files.

What it pulled was everything a Chinese internet user in the mid-2000s could not easily buy or stream. Foreign films carrying fan subtitles, whole music discographies the shops never stocked. Broadband was arriving in Chinese cities faster than legal media was, and VeryCD sat exactly in that gap, the well-lit front door to a back room the size of a country. At its height it was the biggest file-sharing hub in China by a wide margin.

The state had noticed early. In October 2008 the broadcast regulator warned VeryCD over unlicensed video and illegal content. The real blow came with a national intellectual-property campaign that hardened after the Chinese leadership visited Washington in early 2011. On 23 January 2011, VeryCD removed every eD2k link to movies and music on the site, posting a short note that it was acting on copyright holders' requests. The index was still there. The links it existed to hold were gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

VeryCD grew the way the best of these sites did, by being the most organized room in a messy building. eMule on its own was a search box full of misnamed junk and dead sources. VeryCD put an editorial layer over it, clean pages with cover art and working links, so you did not have to gamble on whether the file behind an eD2k address was real. That curation was the whole value. Anyone could run eMule. VeryCD told you what to point it at.

~ the unraveling ~

A curated index is also a single address to lean on. A pure peer network like eDonkey is hard to kill because there is no center, but VeryCD had made itself into a center, a company with a name and an office in Shanghai. When the crackdown came, there was somebody to send the notice to and somebody who had to comply. The protocol underneath stayed alive and untouchable. The signpost pointing at it did not, because a signpost has an owner.

~ the long tail ~

The founder had already started moving on. Around 2010 Huang built a new company that would later launch the game platform TapTap and go public years afterward, so the person behind VeryCD landed fine. VeryCD.com kept existing as a lawful media-information site, stripped of the thing that had made it famous. What died on that January day was not a domain but a route, the single best path a whole generation of Chinese users had to films and records the market would not sell them. The eDonkey network still runs somewhere in 2026. The index that made it usable in China does not.

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