A "Wretch" Makes Good

Blogging is gaining in popularity, and Taiwan's most popular blogging community is Wretch. According to a survey by the marketing research firm Insight Xplorer, Wretch--with its blogging platform and online photo album feature--is currently Taiwan's second largest Internet site after Yahoo! Kimo.

Wretch has more than 2.5 million registered users. Those users have generated more than 500 million pictures and 5,000 blog posts. They range from elementary school age to professionals of every occupation. As many as 120 million people visit every day--an amazing amount of traffic.

Some people say Wretch was salvaged from the junk pile. That's putting it too strongly, but it is true that at first it was a simple bulletin board system (BBS) run by students of National Chiao Tung University's computer science department on old, discarded equipment. Chien Chih-yu created the site while still a student. He named the BBS "Anonymous" in Chinese because, he says, "We were all anonymous small-time players. We didn't have big plans for it at first." Though online bulletin boards are widely used by Taiwanese college students, their popularity is limited by the difficulty of use of their registration process, operation, and interface.

The "Anonymous BBS" had been operating for a while when digital cameras started gaining popularity and many young people were getting into digital photography. Some of Chien's classmates had him develop easy-to-use online photo album software so they could share their pictures. In addition to adding the photo album feature, Chien added support for blogging--the trend that was then just taking off overseas. The site became a hybrid, with a BBS, online photo albums, and blogs.

There were just too many young online extroverts wanting to share their photos and thoughts, however. The site, which was only used by a group of friends at first, multiplied in popularity through word of mouth. "To keep up with all the demands on the system, we had to collect all the discarded equipment we could from the department," says Chien. "We managed to put together a useable system." The slapdash system wasn't enough to solve the problem, and in October, 2004, Wretch went down for a week. Many users were agitated by the system outage, and even a teacher registered a complaint. He said he'd put his final exam questions on his blog, and threatened to sue if the site's administrators didn't get it up and running immediately!

Chien Chih-yu and his friends had started the site for fun, but now they found themselves on the back of a tiger with no easy way down. "We had to take responsibility for our site," Chien says. "It wasn't like it was in the past anymore, when we could just switch the computer off when we got bored with it." In March of 2005, they moved Wretch off the university's servers and formally started a company with NT$20 million.

After incorporating, Wretch earned most of its profits from online advertising and membership fees. (Basic membership, however, is free.) As the interface is easy to use and the online photo album functionality is powerful, the company broke even in just three months. In 2005, it grossed NT$13 million. Membership exploded from just 380,000 at the time of the company's formation to more than 2.3 million in the space of just one year.

The blog world mirrors society, and with all the blogs on Wretch, there are all sorts of strange and unusual things going on at any given moment. There are always people being slandered or personally attacked, and indignant victims occasionally call up Wretch's offices to complain or request that a certain posting be taken down. Users put up albums of photos of counterfeit goods for sale in online auctions. Bloggers put copyrighted music and video on their blogs. Chien Chih-yu can only say that Wretch merely provides a blogging platform and cannot act as an agent of law enforcement. All users, he says, must take legal responsibility for their online actions. Wretch has run into this sort of problem in the past and has turned the cases over to the proper authorities.

But in addition to these instances of trouble, there are also many more touching stories from the blogs. One example is Wretch's Books on Demand service, through which bloggers can have their blogs printed and bound into hard-copy books to give as mementos. One junior high school student had a book made of her blog to present to her computer-illiterate father so he could better understand her. One girl kept a private blog about her innermost feelings and had them made into a book to give to her boyfriend for Valentine's Day. It seems that whether it's traditional print media or the hipper blog format, interpersonal relationships still make for the most moving subject matter. From its humble beginnings as an Internet experiment running on cobbled-together discarded equipment to its current position at the forefront of the blogging revolution in Taiwan, Wretch has made its mark. Looking toward the future in the ever-changing online world, Chien hopes his company will always keep its youthful vitality. "We will grow strong together with Taiwan's online community," he says, full of confidence.

Seeing opportunity in advertising, Wretch actively seeks out collaborative relationships with advertisers.

Wretch's management are all graduates of National Chiao Tung University's computer science department. From left to right: Pan Wei-cheng, Chien Chih-yu, Wu Wei-kai, and Lin Hung-chuan.