KPOPALYPSE INTERVIEW – Kpopping
It’s Kpopalypse back with another interview! This time we’re talking to the owner of the website Kpopping!
The other day I was just minding my own business in the Kpoposphere, which I’m known to do because I’m never outspoken about anything in particular, and my lovely readers suddenly started sending me stuff like this:
And the tweets in question:
These tweets definitely upset a lot of people. Clearly, my readers had found someone with caonima attitude. Investigation revealed that Kpopping.com is a Wiki-style site with lots of information and the biggest stash of idol images I have ever seen! However it struck me as odd that there wasn’t much of the attitude from these tweets on display on the actual website. I decided that I had better talk to them and find out exactly what was going on, as well as find out more about Kpopping.com in general. What follows is our hour-long conversation about website building, SEO slop farms and various other random k-pop matters!
Give us a quick background of Kpopping.
Kpopping.com is a collaborative K-pop database. We started around 2016 and we’ve been building for the past nine years. It’s a Wiki, so any user that signs in can edit their favorite idol’s profile, they can add music videos, they can add pictures and so on. We started with myself (David) and Roland, we eventually had another co-founder that left, he’s the one who actually introduced me to your work. He couldn’t be here today because he had other stuff to do. I got into K-pop a little before 2010 when Girls Generation had their breakout success, but he was the one who really introduced me to your work, and Asian Junkie and that sort of thing, so it’s too bad he couldn’t be here.
Please send my regards! So what separates your site from other collaborative k-pop profile sites like Kprofiles?
Our primary advantage I’d say that we have is that we’re just more in depth so we have more features to our website. When you’re a WordPress site you’re sort of limited in that regard, you can’t hook up APIs, you’re restricted to embedding YouTube videos on HTML Pages. With Kpopping you can follow your favorite idols, which will give you updates on when they release music, whenever a picture is uploaded of them etc. It’s a lot more powerful.
More features are coming every day. One of the things I like about some websites right now like Letterboxd for instance is they have this cool list feature. It allows people to just add their favorite movies or make any ridiculous list they want, like a 2015 Tumblr aesthetic style list or whatever. There’s always more features like that, that we’re adding. I haven’t used Kprofiles in a very long time so comparing ourselves against that is hard.
That’s probably a good thing that you haven’t visited Kprofiles, it probably means you don’t have malware on your computer!
Yeah well I think they’ve actually cleared most of that up recently but yeah that was a noted problem for them.
The way I first found about about Kprofiles wasn’t looking up idols. It was from a cybersecurity report that mentioned them on a list of infected sites. The infection was a fake but fairly authentic-looking popup that you’d get when you visited the site, that said your browser is out of date and which invited you to download an update, and when you’d download it you’d get infected with an information stealer that would take all your stored browser passwords .
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with websites like Liquipedia and Curse but in Starcraft there was this online database called Liquipedia which was very popular in Korea and the USA. They actually created an ad platform and that’s who we use, and they’re very safe and they’re very legitimate. They got acquired by Curse for millions of dollars, way outside my budget, but they’ve been great. It sucks having to run ads at all, but you know I’ve got a team and they need to eat. We’ve got a very low price subscription for like $3 and Stripe eats 80 cents of that so it’s like $2.20 that we get for each subscription. I feel like these days you’re stuck on the internet, there’s no good options for if you want to build things. You’ve got to basically run ads, so I don’t want to shit on everybody that’s running ads, it’s just you’ve got to be watching and mindful and you probably shouldn’t be, you know, distributing malware to people!
What was the motivation that got you to make that leap from just being a fan of k-pop to starting the website?
I was about 30 years old and I wanted a massive project. I’ve only been doing small projects before and then that aligned with my interest in K-pop. I was like “wow there’s there’s no tools for this genre out there, it’s all like Google spreadsheets and Google Docs and group orders”. I never got into the merchandise side but it was ridiculous back then – I’m sure you remember what it like 10 years ago. You’re in Australia – I don’t actually know how it works there, but in the States it was it was very difficult, and I’m near Korea Town you know, so it should be easy for me and it was not. So I was like “okay we gotta we got to build our own Wiki here we we’ve got the tools we’ve got the power we’ve got the technology we can get it done”. However the first year or two it was just awful because we overextended – just constant server crashes and memory problems and bots taking us down and just a lot of issues in the beginning. We wanted to do everything and you can’t do everything, you’ve gotta really focus a little bit. Just being a general K-pop platform I think it’s been tried like a dozen times by now. I remember when we started there was Moonrok.com and she had idols on her actual website itself. She was getting idols to promote her, and you know even that that was not enough for her to keep going, the site was dead in like a year and a half so you know you got to really focus your website building.
Have you ever been the target of DDOS attacks or targeted harassment?
We get lots of bot attacks but you know I can’t really attribute them to anything specific. We’ve had our Twitter for last nine years or so but it hasn’t really affected anything. The people can try, but there’s Cloudflare now – you put on a bot defense mode and that’s really it.
Have K-pop stands tried to dox you or anything of that nature? I’m sure that you’re upsetting a lot of people…
I haven’t really been doxxed yet. My name is on the website itself and people can look me up, I’ve been invited to concerts, I’ve got press passes and whatnot so I’m sure people could dox me, but no it hasn’t been a problem. I’ve got a job, so kpopping is not my full-time business, so not being doxxed would be fantastic, I’ll keep crossing my fingers!
Your site came to my attention recently because of some of the interactions between you and various people on Twitter. People were not very happy with some of the things you were saying and I thought “here’s someone who’s probably worth having a chat to”, but then when I looked at your site there wasn’t really any sign of the you that’s on Twitter in the actual site itself.
I was just doing that for engagement really, a little visibility boost. I don’t think very many people would be listening to my personal Twitter account. I was jumping into conversations on k-pop Twitter about it and, you know, if you want to make a point to as many people as possible so you do with your main account.
Well, I guess it worked! It got the attention of my readers who quickly alerted me to it. I thought that you were someone who’s probably read my writing.
I used to read it back in the day and we’re still in the same vibe I guess, but I can’t have Kpopping where it’s just an angry Twitter personality coming through on your website. I want Kpopping to be… I hate to use the word “professional” because I’ve gotten called unprofessional like 50 times… but kpop is about trying hard, it’s a perfectionist craft. It’s a genre of pushing things, and I think a website should reflect that. If you’re in this genre you should have a colorful website, it should be professional, you know…
I’m starting to feel judged!
No you shouldn’t feel that way, because you don’t have ads!
Do you think you would have felt as comfortable replying to kpop fans in the manner in which you did in the the ban-happy pre-Elon Twitter days?
There has definitely been a vibe shift with language at least, and I’m not an Elon fan at all, even when the vibe shift is benefitting me. It’s definitely a clear vibe shift, even the Blackpink stuff that recently got leaked…
They’re definitely one-upping you in the slur game!
Yeah, but as you can see there are more defenders than ever. You know I wasn’t really expecting that, but I guess fans will always come to the defense of their faves, that’s pretty regular.
Do you plan to ever expand your self-expression on the site itself? Maybe not within the core site, as you’re going for more of a Wikipedia approach, but maybe like attaching a blog or a similar space where you can express yourself? It seems like you do enjoy it from what I can tell.
We’ve had so many ideas over the years. Right now if you’re interested in like blogging and K-pop, it’s very difficult to to become a writer right now. Blogs in general are getting destroyed on Google so I’m not even sure there’s much of a future for K-pop writers beyond people who already have established fanbases. It’s probably not something that we’re going to do, and we already have a news page and some volunteers have asked to write news articles. It’s just a quality thing. I want to make sure that they’re going to be quality news articles. I hate reading slop, I hate reading the basic grammar issues that some people have, and it’s hard even formatting an article. I value the freedom of expression, it’s just not something that we could really sustain on k-pop for like a wiki-style site. A wiki is all about being like a a tertiary source; we parse what we see in the media and we upload it to the site, so that’s really what I want to really focus on. Like I said, we’ve got lists coming out next, we have a whole new update in the works after we finish this one, with like, stupid things. I want to add a weather API to the front page of Kpopping so we can see the weather in Korea, so right next to where it says it’s 10pm in Korea right now now we’re going to have like a little sunshine icon or a little nighttime icon right there…
We’ll just have to keep in tune to your Twitter account to get the self-expression side from you I guess! I might have to start using Twitter again. I quit it because the terms of service changed to allow AI training. I thought I’m not going to use it anymore because I write books and they have covers and I don’t want to get my artist who handrew the book covers and have his work on Twitter where it can be scraped by Elon’s bots…
I’m sure you’ve already been scraped and you just don’t know it…
Oh yeah absolutely. It’s more of an ideological thing for me, realistically I’m sure the bots have been to Kpopalypse.com many times and stolen everything inside.
Oh yeah it’s crazy if you’re if you’re watching for that. You’re on the training data like 500 times over!
I know I have been, because I’ve tried to get the AI to write like me and at first it wouldn’t do it! It’d just say “we’re not allowed to produce anything that could be considered erogatory or offensive” etc…
You’ve got a loophole right there!
It’s starting to get better at it. Nowadays AIs will try to write something in Kpopalypse style but it’s a very watered-down “gee golly gosh” version. I think AI is never going to replace me because these systems are just coded with too many rules and my content breaks their terms of service.
So are you on Mastodon?
I am but I don’t use it, I find it confusing, I don’t really understand it. I’m on BlueSky, which is relatively straightforward, like a simple Twitter.
Do you like it? Are you seeing the engagement?
There’s less engagement but there’s more genuine engagement. It definitely feels like there’s less bots. I’m sure at some point it’ll become enshittified, but right now it’s like Twitter was in 2015.
It’s a treadmill, we just got to keep hopping from platform to platform to platform indefinitely, because the enshittification is so common. Do you get a lot of traffic off Bluesky, or Twitter before that? For us it’s like it’s like less than 1% and it was always less than 1% off socials in general.
It was probably about 2% on Twitter it’s probably about 1 % on BlueSky. Most people who find my site find it because they’re searching boobs and K-pop. I’ve got the 10 daily most popular posts on my sidebar and it’s always just boobs and ass all the way down unless I’ve posted something new and then it’s a new thing somewhere in there and the rest is all boobs and ass. I could probably remove that popular posts feature and I’d probably get a lot less hate but I keep it there because I think it’s just a really good indication and reminder of what people are really interested in versus what they pretend to be interested in. If you talk to anyone in the kpop fan community they’re like “oh objectification is terrible we don’t do that” but obviously they do because they’re fucking searching for it and that’s how they find me!
For our search system we could see what the last searches were for the last 30 minutes. We don’t keep the user data but we do keep what people are searching for and some of the stuff is just ridiculous, like I see Waterbomb nudes one minute ago and that’s been searched like 100 times…
Did you get “Goo Hara nude” and “Goo Hara sex tape” searches when she died, because I got a lot of that…
I don’t remember anything specific but that’s pretty horrible so I’d probably remember that! In general there’s there’s a lot of revealed preferences stuff in kpop, for instance r/kpopfap on Reddit is releasing nipslips of Jennie and whatnot and then their neighboring subreddit r/kpop is up in arms against it, it’s just very bizarre seeing the revealed preferences right next to the the proclaimed preferences.
Apart from kpopping.com of course, what do you think are the other kpop sites out there now that are actually worth people’s time?
There’s a lot of people doing cool stuff in in K-pop like kpop-radar for instance. Their API’s are much better than ours, they’ve somehow figured out the Facebook and Instagram APIs which were very difficult for us, and they have hourly data for YouTube that’s that’s better than we could do. Even Soompi is not that bad, I have no problem with that website, it’s kdramas and that sort of shit but yeah it’s not bad, this is not horrible. What I don’t like is are things like Allkpop, and giving malware to users and showing porn ads to kids under 18. But you know, I like the blog content like yours and there’s a lot of other people that are trying in Kpop to make something. It’s just we’ve got to stay away from rewarding the slop. Like, what what features has Allkpop built in the last ten years, can can anybody tell me? Well they basically just remodeled their akorns. I was listening to a user complaining about that the other day, talking about how their akorns are a scam…
I haven’t used Allkpop since Aileegate, what is an akorn?
Aileegate – man, it’s good that people still remember that! I feel like a crazy person sometimes, like I’m yelling at clouds and nobody really knows what I’m talking about!
I know all about Aileegate, but for the young K-pop fans Ailee herself is probably a distant memory because everything moves so quickly.
I’m looking at the website right now and trying to figure out how these akorns work but apparently you can buy merch here at their akorn shop, but apparently once you get the akorns it doesn’t actually send you the merchandise. I can’t confirm or deny this as I’ve never actually had the masochistic urge to earn an akorn on Allkpop, but yeah that’s the word on the street, that even that is a scam.
I’m looking at the site now as well… “obtain Acorn through forum activity or PayPal purchase…” Yeah right, this is actually like…
I know it’s it’s more impressive than I thought, they actually have like an interconnect system going on there connected with PayPal digital currency…
It’s like a cryptocurrency… maybe that’s what they’ll do with it maybe they’ll float akorns on the crypto exchange you can invest in acorns or exchange your Bitcoin for acorns and Johnny Noh will do a pump and dump…
Allkpop gets like 20 million a month and where are they getting this from, it’s crazy. Once you got the backlinks you could do whatever the hell you want, it’s one of the reasons I didn’t care about the Twitter thing again, because social media just is irrelevant compared to Google.
Given that platforms like Google and Facebook are trying to keep users from going to external sites because they now give you AI results so if you do a search you just get the result within Google, do you think that the days of the SEO slop farms are numbered?
I think for some of them. I think it’s true for a lot of the low quality ones, but links are everything and a lot of these websites like Allkpop have backlinks from places like billboard.com and you’re never going to be able to overcome that in the current model. There’s such a heavy portion of the algorithm that determines search engine positions. Allkpop could just make some of the worst slop imaginable but that’ll still be rank one and rank two and it’s never going to change under the current model. Google releases updates every quarter basically and there’s supposed to be these huge sweeping changes and it’s it just always more of the same shit the last like 15 years they’ve been doing it. It’s always “oh yeah this time they’ll get it right” and they get like 10% of the the dog crap off and by the time they they get that 10% off there’s like an additional 50% so we’re in a losing battle and it’s always been a losing battle. All you can do is really convince a few good users like on BlueSky like you were talking about, that’s all you can really do. We have a hundred plus subscribers and even though it’s only $3 a month I cherish these people dearly because they’re committing to helping us build.
Do you know if you have backlinks to Allkpop on kpopping?
I don’t think I have any backlinks to Allkpop. I haven’t checked in a while. We had it specifically hardcoded a while back, something that would give you a bug when you tried to link to Allkpop, but we’ve had so many updates since then that I don’t even remember if that code got commented out or something and I don’t want to embarrass myself if some user had linked Allkpop as a source, but as far as I know we don’t have them linked.
Just mentioning it as Kpopalypse.com has an official boycott of Allkpop and Koreaboo.
Were Koreaboo associated with Kcon though?
Oh I’ve got no idea, I just don’t like them.
I’ve never been much of a Koreaboo user but I think they have the reputation of being a lower quality site… I don’t know how would you describe it?
The BuzzFeed of K-pop.
BuzzFeed, yeah… wow that was like 10 years ago…
Showing my age perhaps! What I particularly didn’t like about Koreaboo was when Sulli died and 48 hours after her death they had like 40 articles up and were really just exploiting her death for clicks as much as possible. The same thing happened when Goo Hara died, same thing happened when Moonbin from Astro died, and it’s pretty irresponsible given what the actual guidelines for celebrity suicide reporting are. When they did that I just thought “fuck these dickheads I’m just going to boycott them” and my boycotts last for seven years and then they get a performance review. I think Koreaboo and Allkpop have their performance reviews coming up later this year so we’ll check in on them and see if I want to boycott for another seven.
The suicide reporting is pretty difficult because you want to be reporting on it but you don’t want to glamorise it, or you don’t even want a lot of reporting.
Reporting when someone suicides is fine, I’ve got no problem with that generally speaking, but when there’s constant updates every 15 minutes obviously milking the grief for clicks… there’s a lot of irresponsible reporting in k-pop.
Yeah, we got an impressionable audience. Well, not you so much – it’s more me that has an impressionable audience I guess. Your impressionable audience has probably been beaten back with a stick by now!
I think what tends to happen with me is the people who don’t like me don’t tend to visit my site or engage with me, they just look at copy-pasted bits of my site on other websites and then they just sort of bitch to each other about how evil I am! So I don’t actually see much of that engagement at all. Very very very rarely one of them will have the guts to actually ask me a question or say something to me. I mean I’m not going to rip anyone’s head off, they’ve got nothing to fear really but people don’t tend to engage with what they hate, they tend to just talk to their friends about how much they hate it.
Yyou’re an intimidating figure, you’ve got that Kpopalypse name, it sounds pretty dangerous – who knows what these Australians are capable of!
Who knows what these people think! But people get away with all sorts of stuff I mean I don’t think Johnny Noh ever got any consequences for the whole Aileegate revenge porn stuff?
I don’t think so at all, I never heard of anything he just sort of smiled and said hey the traffic’s only gone down by 2% we’ll just carry on. I doubt it even went down by 2% honestly.
I remember that he even showed a graph on his Twitter at the time and it only showed a tiny little dip.
There are just no consequences on Google. There are no manual reviews for a lot of these internet communities that you would think there would be. K-pop is massively popular on Google and you would think there would be at least somebody who worked at Google that would say “maybe we shouldn’t be promoting websites that leak idol news that are underaged”, that would be something you might expect, but in K-pop and gaming and another few communities too it’s just like the wild west and the slop – the dirty players win.
What do you think about translation mill sites like Netizenbuzz and Pannchoa, do you have much experience with those?
You know, we’re a bit of a translation mill site ourselves with our our news posts a little bit so I can’t really shit on them too much. They definitely have an interesting effect on the k-pop community, those sites can whip up scandal like nothing else. I’m not really afraid of the Twitter mob, but Pannchoa mob, well you can see what those guys can do.
Netizenbuzz basically rose to fame on the back of the T-ara scandal, that was a big traffic move for them that made them from a little site to a huge one and of course all that T-ara bullying stuff was all completely fabricated and I was very much aware of that while it was happening, and I was one of the only voices out there saying “look this is all bullshit” and most people didn’t believe me.
They had to like go through China, retreating to China for like a year.
Netizenbuzz was very big on editorializing in a very negative way against T-ara which kind of sucked because the girls didn’t actually do anything wrong.
It’s still like a witch hunt, still ridiculous. It’s amazing that they lasted through that.
Well, what were they going to do, what other options were there. A lot of people say now “oh it destroyed them” but I remember Sexy Love was a huge song for them and that happened right when they were the most hated group in Korea. Everyone was against them except me and a tiny handful of others and the hardcore fans and they were getting shit on daily in the Korean press and the international press, but Sexy Love was massive so I don’t think they were really hurt as badly as people think think they were. I think that eventually they did fall off a couple years later a little bit because they just became an older group and they weren’t releasing that constant string of songs like they were when they were a younger group. They also got big in China so they were like “let’s just go get the China money”.
I thought their later hits were personally I think much better than Sexy Love.
Yeah I really like Sugar Free and Number Nine too, I thought they were great. But that’s how Netizenbuzz got on my shit list, because she was basically rubbing her hands with glee about T-ara being “over” and I thought “yeah you kind of suck”.
I don’t know why a site like that would want to like burn their bridges with an artist. I would never just relentlessly attack a group for attention, especially groups’ production companies. These people don’t go away.
Have you had any idols or ex idols or industry people reach out to you to with “tea” or anything like that?
No. We’ve talked to a bunch of like smaller time idols but it’s all very official, you know “my marketing manager told me to say hi to you guys”. I don’t really get any “tea” I don’t think we’re really known for it. I don’t want to call it a translation mill but we don’t really do that much hard-hitting stuff, it’s like a forum style news.
So you don’t even do what Asian Junkie does where he’ll sort of collate news and then give an opinion or anything like that?
Yeah, we don’t have people that would be interested in the writer’s opinions so much. One of the things we have upcoming is we’re gonna try to make some YouTube videos, some analysis. I think that’s a better domain to approach that stuff rather than text, especially for K-pop… even my attention span it’s not what it was.
We’ve got 25 followers right now on our YouTube channel so and we’ve used it like twice, but in the coming weeks we will definitely be uploading some new videos. We’re working on it right now. Do you have any ideas for what kind of 10-15 minute hard-hitting YouTube content involving K-pop would you like to see? Because there are some famous um uh videos about K-pop on YouTube that are like “the capitalist uh K-pop syndrome”…
“The dark side of k-pop”…
Exactly. I’ve always thought that there are some great elements in K-pop too that deserve to be highlighted, we need somebody to play the white knight for a while in K-pop. There’s horrible things too, but some of these videos are completely off base about K-pop. I think one of the first videos we’re producing is going to be on the age of idols getting lower and lower, but it’s not going to be all positive…
Well that’s happening because that’s what the people want. You know despite the fact they don’t admit it.
There’s an incentive structure.
All the groups of young people blow up and whenever mature age groups debut it’s like crickets so what do they expect the companies to do?
Yeah exactly. So I wanted to go a bit more into depth with that and why that’s happening. I think topics like that are worth discussing.
I already know the answer, I don’t really need to watch a video, but someone who isn’t me is probably going to find a lot of value in that, people who are newer to K-pop having stuff that break things like that down in a way which is not like “dark side for clicks” but not sugar-coating it either. I think there’s real value in that.
Yeah, that’s what I was getting at, the “dark side for clicks”. We’re under siege man, we’re getting attacked from all sides!
I’m quite sympathetic to “dark side” content because k-pop can be pretty dark in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s horrible for everybody, or there isn’t niches where people can exist and be happy. When people say “should I get into the industry” my answer isn’t “no”, my answer is “be informed”.
Yeah exactly. I don’t think I would recommend anybody to become an idol, or try to become an idol. It seems like it’s you’re better off buying lottery tickets.
Even if you win like a $10 prize on the ticket it’s probably more than half your earnings!
Except you’re gonna waste like eight years of your life and get an ankle injury and that’s going to take you out, or something stupid like that! That’s probably the best case scenario.
There are not many people like IU out there.
Yeah people who have a little control over their artistry it’s not many. Maybe once the indie artists in Korea but you know K-pop itself I wouldn’t recommend.
Indie artists, they get screwed over financially too because they just can’t make any money!
Is there anything that you’d like to say that I haven’t touched on?
I think we covered it all – thank you for talking to me!
Thanks for reading this interview! Are you, or do you know, someone involved in the world of k-pop who would make a good Kpopalypse Interview subject? If so, get in touch!
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