.yell plus

» see yell.plus as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

DMM opened it on Monday 25 May 2015 as DMM.yell, and what it sold was a verb. You bought points inside the app with real money and converted them into a unit called yell, which you then spent by pressing a button under a selfie or a short video that a performer had posted. DMM kept the money. The performer accumulated a count.

The count ran in two directions, and the second direction is the part nobody else copied. Posts were ranked by how much yell they had collected, which is the obvious half of any tipping product. The launch release also states that on each performer's page the app displayed a ranking of the users who had sent her the most. Your spending was itemized and published next to the spending of every other fan of the same person.

At launch there were 150 groups and more than 750 performers on it, including the eleven-member SUPER☆GiRLS and the rock unit PASSPO☆, and the app took submissions from 一般の女の子 as well, girls with no agency behind them, which DMM described as a front door for anyone wanting to try. The reward for winning was written in the future tense: promotion on the site, and chances to appear at events. DMM put on its own live at a Shibuya venue called Dr. Jeekahns on 27 June 2015 and spent that summer attached to Tokyo Idol Festival.

~ the dossier ~

~ the scoreboard on her page ~

By the time the app changed hands in November 2017 it carried 1,900 groups and over 4,300 named performers, and the running total of yell sent through it had passed 3.2 billion. It had settled into three channels by then, the third of them reserved for people with no agency at all, and every channel could be re-sorted by yell count instead of by date, so the whole surface of the thing was a leaderboard with a photo feed stapled to the front.

I have no standing to describe how that felt from the inside. Japanese idol fandom in 2015 had a vocabulary and an etiquette that reached me only secondhand, and the relationship .yell plus charged for is one I have never had with a performer. The design is legible though, and it is unusually honest about the product: what the money bought was not access to her, it was a ranked position among everyone else who wanted access to her.

~ three owners, two of them quiet ~

Axel Mark, a Tokyo mobile company listed under code 3624, took DMM.yell over and renamed it .yell plus on 1 November 2017, announcing both in the same release at twelve minutes past noon. The stated logic was that yell meant 応援, support, and that the brand was worth keeping while new engagement features got added on top, hence plus. DMM agreed to stay on and help run it. Axel Mark called the moment a phase of business expansion.

Two years later the operator changed again and nobody said so. The site's own copyright byline reads AXEL GAME Entertainment in the capture from 21 September 2019 and ILCA Inc. in the capture from 22 November, and there is no press release on either side of that gap. ILCA was a Tokyo studio founded in October 2010 by a game creator named Takuya Iwasaki, out of computer graphics work for anime and television, and the initials stand for I Love Computer Art.

Which is how an idol-cheering app ended up at the developer of Pokémon HOME, and then of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, the first mainline entry in that series Nintendo had ever contracted out. By 2021 .yell plus was being run jointly by ILCA and a company called yell Inc., a group company of Dearstage, the agency behind the Akihabara idol bar of the same name. Both ILCA and yell Inc. list a representative director named Takuya Iwasaki.

~ the last ten days ~

Version 4.1.8 reached Google Play on Tuesday 20 July 2021 and the App Store on the Wednesday, logged as a bug fix. The service closed on 30 July. The Internet Archive holds the front page from 26 July with a working ログイン link sitting in the navigation, and the next copy, from 5 August, has that link still in the markup but commented out rather than removed, which is what shutting something down looks like when somebody edits a template in a hurry.

The replacement had been running for two months already. yell Inc. put .yell Live into pre-release on 1 June 2021 with a full launch set for 1 July, and its own feature list describes the photo and video posting as inherited from .yell plus, so the predecessor was switched off twenty-nine days after its successor opened properly. Six years of operation left 26 ratings on the App Store and four on Google Play. Pokémon Brilliant Diamond shipped on 19 November, sixteen weeks later.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »