'Sayclub', what is it?

Hello! First blog post on this account. #awesome

If you have a cute aesthetic and looked on tumblr for gifs to decorate your profile and blog posts with, you might've come across these (or similar) ones and wondered 'what exactly is this'?

Today I'll do a short blog post on what Sayclub is, and where you can find more!

Sayclub was a Korean chatting website from the early 2000s (reminiscent of sites like Hyves, Friendster, ICQ etc.). In this time period, avatars were majorly popular on the internet and dedicated websites were made to be able to share your own creations and put them up for sale. You could typically buy these in the 'mall' section of the website with fictional currency. Here are (google translated) screenshots of the Sayclub mall!

(Wayback Machine link)

As you can see from the above link, you can only access a portion of what the Sayclub mall looked like because it apparently shut down sometime last year. It's devastating to hear that I'm just a bit too late to see it myself.. But for those interested to see an avatar mall that is still intact, take a look at the Netmarble mall!

Luckily for us, people have archived some of the dolls and other assets that were made for Sayclub. If you feel like browsing through some of them, take a look at sayclubdoll on Tumblr! animatedglittergraphics-n-more, cutewebgraphics and lonely444gorgeous are some other blogs on Tumblr that share lovely gifs (including Sayclub) to decorate with. When searching for Sayclub online, you can still find old blogspot blogs and livejournals talking about the site as far back as the late 90s! Sadly as time passed, most of the pictures shared within those communities have broken.

In the end, there's not much to say about it! It was a site where many artists made cute assets for people to buy, share and trade, like a lot of avatar-based sites at the time. It eventually lost its traffic and so changed up their branding. If you're curious as to what has become of Sayclub, it appears that the website is now used for hosting radio shows online.

If you have any information about Sayclub that you'd like to share (since this was a short breeze through the basics) or games/media that remind you of these graphics feel free to leave a comment!

Please check out the other sources I used if you're curious! They explain some things better than I do haha.

PIXELPEEPZ' comment on this Reddit post

dulceridae's Reddit post