Nico Nico Douga
Encyclopedia
is a popular video sharing
website in Japan
managed by Niwango
, a subsidiary of Dwango. Its nickname is "Niconico" or "Nico-dō", where "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone
for smiling. Nico Nico Douga is the thirteenth most visited website in Japan. The site won the Japanese Good Design Award
in 2007, and an Honorary Mention of the Digital Communities category at Prix Ars Electronica
2008.
serving as director at Niwango, Nico Nico Douga's atmosphere and cultural context is close to 2channel
's or Futaba Channel
's, and many popular videos have otaku
tastes, such as anime
, computer games and pop music
. Nico Nico Douga offers tagging of videos. Tags may be edited by any user, not just the uploader. Each video may have up to ten tags, of which up to five may be optionally locked by the uploader, but all others may be edited by any user. Frequently these tags are used not only as categorization, but also as critical commentary, satire, or other humor related to the video's content. The site is also known for its MAD Movies and its medleys
of popular songs on the website, most notably Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga
. Certain anime are distributed on the website, such as Candy Boy
, Tentai Senshi Sunred
and Penguin Musume Heart
.
Other features include:
as a video source. However, as the site became more popular, so much traffic was transferred from YouTube that YouTube blocked access from Nico Nico Douga. Consequently Nico Nico Douga was forced to shut down the service but two weeks later it commenced its service with its own video server. On May 7, 2007, the Nico Nico Douga for mobile phone
users was announced. Since August 9, 2007, "Nico Nico Douga (RC) Mobile" has serviced mobile phones of NTT DoCoMo
and au.
As of October 31, 2011, Nico Nico Douga has over 23,690,000 registered users, 6,870,000 mobile users and 1,390,000 premium users. Due to the limited server capacity, Niwango limits the amount of free users accessible to the website at peak times (7 p.m. to 2 a.m.), based on the time of registration. The website is written in Japanese
and the majority of the site traffic is from Japan, although approximately four percent is from outside of Japan, notably one percent from Taiwan. A Taiwanese version of the site was launched on October 18, 2007. In July 2008, the website was localized to German and Spanish. The Taiwanese localization was significantly improved in the process.
, DailyMotion
and Nico Nico Douga and view them in Nico Nico Douga's player, which includes the commenting system, as well as add English tags to them. Improvements later made to the site allow users to upload their own videos, with subscribed users able to host livestreams. The site also began streaming select anime titles from June 2011 onwards. On October 14, 2011, Niconico announced a partnership with Funimation Entertainment
to form Funico, to handle licensing of anime properties for streaming and home video.
Premium-Membership:
Registration is needed to watch videos at Nico Nico Douga. There are two types of registered accounts, Free membership and Premium-membership. The Premium-membership fee is 525 yen
(about US$
6) a month. As of October 13, 2010, they reached 1,000,000 premium members. They accept two forms of payment: credit cards and WebMoney vouchers.
Advertisement:
Nico Nico Douga uses Google Ads and other web advertisements. On May 8, 2008, Niwango announced partnership with Yahoo! Japan
, and plans to adopt search-related ads and other Yahoo-related services.
Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate):
Nico Nico Ichiba is a unique advertisement system in which users can place banners freely in each video page. Both video uploader and video viewer can choose items which they want to place, and can place and delete banners in the advertisement area. Users also can know how many times each banner has been clicked and how many items have been bought. Ranking info of numbers of items bought through Nico Nico Ichiba is also officially provided. Items available are from Amazon.co.jp
, Yahoo Shopping, and Dwango mobile service.
Premium accounts and the affiliate system were, in the past, only available to Japanese users. Non-Japanese users can now apply for a premium membership on the Japanese site with international JCB cards or WebMoney vouchers only (other acceptance logos only cover Japan-issued cards), language barrier notwithstanding. Also, as of July 2010, Nico Nico Ichiba has been extended to the Taiwanese website.
, Japanese copyright holders' society agreed to form a comprehensive partnership and Niwango will pay two percent of its earnings to JASRAC as copyright royalties. On March 11, 2008, Dwango announced that they would tighten up on the deletion of videos and monitoring uploaded videos. In the same way, on July 2, 2008, Dwango announced to three organizations that they would strengthen the deletion of anime and related content, including videos that use elements of copyrighted anime (known as MAD Movies). At the same time, Nico Nico Douga changed its system to expose what right holder deleted which video.
Video sharing
Video hosting services refers to websites or software where users can distribute their video clips. Other sites such as file hosting services image hosting services and social network services might support video sharing as an enhancement to their primary mission, but in general, they are not...
website in Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
managed by Niwango
Niwango
is a Japanese company that manages Nico Nico Douga. Its headquarters are in the in Shibuya, Tokyo. It is a subsidiary of Dwango....
, a subsidiary of Dwango. Its nickname is "Niconico" or "Nico-dō", where "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone
Ideophone
Ideophones are words used by speakers to evoke a vivid impression of certain sensation or sensory perceptions, e.g. smell, color, shape, sound, action, or movement. Ideophones are attested in all languages of the world, however, languages differ in the extent to which they make use of them...
for smiling. Nico Nico Douga is the thirteenth most visited website in Japan. The site won the Japanese Good Design Award
Good Design Award
The is Japanese comprehensive design evaluation and commendation system, operated by Japan Industrial Design Promotion Organization . The system has its origins in the “Good Design Selection System” instituted by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan in 1957.The award system...
in 2007, and an Honorary Mention of the Digital Communities category at Prix Ars Electronica
Prix Ars Electronica
The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music...
2008.
Features
Users can upload, view and share video clips. Unlike other video sharing sites, however, comments are overlaid directly onto the video, synced to a specific playback time. This allows comments to respond directly to events occurring in the video, in sync with the viewer—creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Together with Hiroyuki NishimuraHiroyuki Nishimura
is the founder and a former administrator of the most accessed Japanese message board site 2channel. He currently holds a position of Director at Niwango Inc., known for its service Nico Nico Douga.In Japan, he is usually known by his given name, Hiroyuki....
serving as director at Niwango, Nico Nico Douga's atmosphere and cultural context is close to 2channel
2channel
is a Japanese textboard. In 2007 there were 2.5 million posts made every day. Launched in 1999, it has gained significant influence in Japanese society, comparable to that of traditional mass media such as television, radio, and magazines. As of 2008, the site generates revenue upwards of ¥100...
's or Futaba Channel
Futaba Channel
, or Futaba for short, is an internet forum in Japan. It is a popular Japanese imageboard dealing in otaku and underground culture.-Origin:Futaba Channel was set up on August 30, 2001, as a refuge for 2channel users when 2channel was in danger of shutting down...
's, and many popular videos have otaku
Otaku
is a Japanese term used to refer to people with obsessive interests, particularly anime, manga or video games.- Etymology :Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family , which is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun...
tastes, such as anime
Anime
is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....
, computer games and pop music
Pop music
Pop music is usually understood to be commercially recorded music, often oriented toward a youth market, usually consisting of relatively short, simple songs utilizing technological innovations to produce new variations on existing themes.- Definitions :David Hatch and Stephen Millward define pop...
. Nico Nico Douga offers tagging of videos. Tags may be edited by any user, not just the uploader. Each video may have up to ten tags, of which up to five may be optionally locked by the uploader, but all others may be edited by any user. Frequently these tags are used not only as categorization, but also as critical commentary, satire, or other humor related to the video's content. The site is also known for its MAD Movies and its medleys
Medley (music)
In music, a medley is a piece composed from parts of existing pieces, usually three, played one after another, sometimes overlapping. They are common in popular music, and most medleys are songs rather than instrumental. A medley which is a remixed series is called a megamix, often done with tracks...
of popular songs on the website, most notably Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga
Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga
is the name of a series of video medleys, and is also the title of one of the videos in the series. The original video was created by Shimo , a user of the popular video sharing site Nico Nico Douga.-Overview:...
. Certain anime are distributed on the website, such as Candy Boy
Candy Boy
is an eight minute original net animation produced by Anime International Company, and directed by Takafumi Hoshikawa. Since November 22, 2007, the ONA is available through streaming on the Cho! animelo audiovisual website and the Nico Nico Douga online video service. This was followed by a...
, Tentai Senshi Sunred
Tentai Senshi Sunred
is a Japanese manga created by Makoto Kubota. It started serialization on Square Enix's seinen manga magazine Young Gangan on August 25, 2005. An anime adaptation produced by AIC A.S.T.A. aired from October 3, 2008 to March 27, 2009 in Japan. The second season of the anime started airing on October...
and Penguin Musume Heart
Penguin Musume
is a Japanese manga series, written by manga author Tetsuya Takahashi. The manga was serialized in the Japanese shōnen manga magazine Weekly Shōnen Champion between 2006 and 2007. After the manga ended serialization in Weekly Shōnen Champion, the serialization was restarted from the February 2008...
.
Other features include:
- High video quality: Nico Nico Douga encourages users to pre-encode their videos in a format suitable for unmodified distribution. As of July 5, 2008, H.264H.264/MPEG-4 AVCH.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
video and AACAdvanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
audio is supported for both free and premium users. - Mylist: Each user may create "mylists", which function similarly to a list of bookmarks. All users can create up to twenty-five mylist folders, while a basic account can have 100 videos recorded and a premium (paid) account 500 videos per mylist, giving them a total of 12,500 mylist spots. Daily mylist activity is used to compute the default ranking view, although one may also sort by view or comment count. Mylists may be optionally made public and linked to; for example, to make a list of one's own works.
- Uploader comments: The uploader of a video may attach permanent comments to the video. These are often used for such things as subtitles, lyrics, or corrections.
- Nicoscript: By using special commands in the uploader comments, the uploader can add special effects to the video, including voting, automatic transfer to another video, quiz scoring, and other features.
History
The first version of Nico Nico Douga used YouTubeYouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
as a video source. However, as the site became more popular, so much traffic was transferred from YouTube that YouTube blocked access from Nico Nico Douga. Consequently Nico Nico Douga was forced to shut down the service but two weeks later it commenced its service with its own video server. On May 7, 2007, the Nico Nico Douga for mobile phone
Mobile phone
A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...
users was announced. Since August 9, 2007, "Nico Nico Douga (RC) Mobile" has serviced mobile phones of NTT DoCoMo
NTT DoCoMo
is the predominant mobile phone operator in Japan. The name is officially an abbreviation of the phrase, "do communications over the mobile network", and is also from a compound word dokomo, meaning "everywhere" in Japanese. Docomo provides phone, video phone , i-mode , and mail services...
and au.
As of October 31, 2011, Nico Nico Douga has over 23,690,000 registered users, 6,870,000 mobile users and 1,390,000 premium users. Due to the limited server capacity, Niwango limits the amount of free users accessible to the website at peak times (7 p.m. to 2 a.m.), based on the time of registration. The website is written in Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
and the majority of the site traffic is from Japan, although approximately four percent is from outside of Japan, notably one percent from Taiwan. A Taiwanese version of the site was launched on October 18, 2007. In July 2008, the website was localized to German and Spanish. The Taiwanese localization was significantly improved in the process.
Niconico.com
In 2010, a version in English was in the works, and in April 2011, an English language beta website, Niconico, was launched. This site allows users to share videos from YouTubeYouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
, DailyMotion
Dailymotion
Dailymotion is a video sharing service website, headquartered in the 18th arrondissement, Paris, France. According to Comscore, Dailymotion is the second largest video site in the world after YouTube....
and Nico Nico Douga and view them in Nico Nico Douga's player, which includes the commenting system, as well as add English tags to them. Improvements later made to the site allow users to upload their own videos, with subscribed users able to host livestreams. The site also began streaming select anime titles from June 2011 onwards. On October 14, 2011, Niconico announced a partnership with Funimation Entertainment
Funimation Entertainment
Funimation is an American entertainment company. Originally founded in 1994 by Gen Fukunaga, the company became a subsidiary of Navarre Corporation on May 11, 2005...
to form Funico, to handle licensing of anime properties for streaming and home video.
Business aspects
The main income of Nico Nico Douga is divided into three parts: Premium-Membership (Pay-membership), Advertisement, and Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate).Premium-Membership:
Registration is needed to watch videos at Nico Nico Douga. There are two types of registered accounts, Free membership and Premium-membership. The Premium-membership fee is 525 yen
Japanese yen
The is the official currency of Japan. It is the third most traded currency in the foreign exchange market after the United States dollar and the euro. It is also widely used as a reserve currency after the U.S. dollar, the euro and the pound sterling...
(about US$
United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
6) a month. As of October 13, 2010, they reached 1,000,000 premium members. They accept two forms of payment: credit cards and WebMoney vouchers.
Advertisement:
Nico Nico Douga uses Google Ads and other web advertisements. On May 8, 2008, Niwango announced partnership with Yahoo! Japan
Yahoo! Japan
is a Japanese internet company formed as a joint venture between the American internet company Yahoo! and the Japanese internet company SoftBank. It is headquartered at Midtown Tower in the Tokyo Midtown complex in Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo.-History:...
, and plans to adopt search-related ads and other Yahoo-related services.
Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate):
Nico Nico Ichiba is a unique advertisement system in which users can place banners freely in each video page. Both video uploader and video viewer can choose items which they want to place, and can place and delete banners in the advertisement area. Users also can know how many times each banner has been clicked and how many items have been bought. Ranking info of numbers of items bought through Nico Nico Ichiba is also officially provided. Items available are from Amazon.co.jp
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
, Yahoo Shopping, and Dwango mobile service.
Premium accounts and the affiliate system were, in the past, only available to Japanese users. Non-Japanese users can now apply for a premium membership on the Japanese site with international JCB cards or WebMoney vouchers only (other acceptance logos only cover Japan-issued cards), language barrier notwithstanding. Also, as of July 2010, Nico Nico Ichiba has been extended to the Taiwanese website.
Financial condition
In the fiscal year from Q4 2010 to Q3 2011, Nico Nico Douga has had a gross income of approximately 10.81 billion yen (US$139.1 million as of November 10, 2011), and posts a 670 million yen (US$8.6 million) operating profit.Copyright problems
On October 30, 2007, Niwango and the JASRACJapanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers
, often referred to as the is a Japanese copyright collection society. It was founded in 1939 as a non-profit making organization, and is the largest musical copyright administration society in Japan....
, Japanese copyright holders' society agreed to form a comprehensive partnership and Niwango will pay two percent of its earnings to JASRAC as copyright royalties. On March 11, 2008, Dwango announced that they would tighten up on the deletion of videos and monitoring uploaded videos. In the same way, on July 2, 2008, Dwango announced to three organizations that they would strengthen the deletion of anime and related content, including videos that use elements of copyrighted anime (known as MAD Movies). At the same time, Nico Nico Douga changed its system to expose what right holder deleted which video.
See also
- Kumikyoku Nico Nico DougaKumikyoku Nico Nico Dougais the name of a series of video medleys, and is also the title of one of the videos in the series. The original video was created by Shimo , a user of the popular video sharing site Nico Nico Douga.-Overview:...
- PixivPixivPixiv is a Japanese online community for artists. It was first launched as a beta test on September 10, 2007 by Takahiro Kamitani. Pixiv Inc. is headquartered in Sendagaya, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. As of May 2010, the site consists of over 2 million members, over 11 million submissions, and receives...
- zoomeZoomewas a video hosting service in Japan managed by .The name is a combination of "zoom" and "me", and means "My broadcasting station& community". zoome supported H.264/MPEG-4 AVC for the first time by a video hosting service in Japan, which is the best picture quality and tone quality currently...
External links
- Nico Nico Douga's official website
- Niconico website
- Smilevideo
- Nico Nico Douga wiki
- Nico Nico Ranking wiki
- Nico Nico Pedia
- http://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/0710/26/news032.htmlInterview with Hiroyuki NishimuraHiroyuki Nishimurais the founder and a former administrator of the most accessed Japanese message board site 2channel. He currently holds a position of Director at Niwango Inc., known for its service Nico Nico Douga.In Japan, he is usually known by his given name, Hiroyuki....
, Director at Niwango, October 27, 2007, ITmedia] - http://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/articles/0807/07/news024.htmlTakeshi Natsuno, Advisor of Dwango and HiroyukiHiroyuki Nishimurais the founder and a former administrator of the most accessed Japanese message board site 2channel. He currently holds a position of Director at Niwango Inc., known for its service Nico Nico Douga.In Japan, he is usually known by his given name, Hiroyuki....
shows up at a summer Nico Nico event, July 7, 2008, ITmedia]