Nico Nico Douga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Nico Nico Douga | |
|---|---|
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| URL | http://www.nicovideo.jp/ |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Video hosting service |
| Registration | Yes |
| Available language(s) | Japanese and Traditional Chinese |
| Owner | Niwango Ltd. |
| Created by | Niwango Ltd. |
| Launched | December 12, 2006 |
| Current status | Active |
Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画 Nikoniko dōga?, lit. "Smiley videos") is a popular video sharing website in Japan managed by Niwango. Its nickname is "Niconico" or "Nico-dō", where "nico nico" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for smiling. Nico Nico Douga is the 6th most visited website in Japan[1]. The site won the Japanese Good Design Award in 2007.[2]
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[edit] Features
Users can upload, view and share video clips like YouTube. 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 occuring in the video, in sync with the viewer - creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Nico Nico Douga's atmosphere is close to 2channel's or Futaba Channel's, and many popular videos have otaku tastes, such as anime, computer game and pop music.
Nico Nico Douga offers tagging, but unlike tags in services such as YouTube, 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.
Other features include:
- High video quality. Unlike sites such as YouTube which re-encode their video, Nico Nico Douga encourages users to pre-encode their videos in a format suitable for unmodified distribution. In particular, the VP6 codec is recommended for high video quality. As of March 5th, 2008, h.264 video and AAC audio are also supported experimentally, for uploaders with premium membership[3].
- Mylist. Each user may create 'mylists', which function similarly to a list of bookmarks. All users can create up to 25 mylists, while a basic account can have 100 videos recorded and a premium (paid) account 500 videos. 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.
[edit] History
The first version of Nico Nico Douga used YouTube 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 shutdown the service but two weeks later it commenced its service with its own video server.
In May 7, 2007, the Nico Nico Douga for mobile phone users was announced. Since August 9, "Nico Nico Douga (RC) Mobile" has serviced mobile phones of NTT DoCoMo and au.[4]
As of October 6, 2007, Nico Nico Douga has 3 million free users and 86,000 premium users.[5] Due to the limited server capacity, Niwango limits the amount of free users accessible to the website at peak times (7pm to 2am), based on the time of registration. The website is written in Japanese and almost all users are Japanese, but 1 percent of the users are Taiwanese.[6] A Taiwanese version of the site was launched on October 18, 2007 to service this audience better.[7]
[edit] Business aspects
The main income of Nico Nico Douga is divided into three parts: Premium-Membership (Pay-membership), Advertisement, and Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate).[8][9] [10]
[edit] 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 around 500 yen (5 US$) a month. As of May 8, 2008, there are 6,210,000 free members and 192,000 premium members.
[edit] 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.
[edit] Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate)
Nico Nico Ichiba is an unique advertisement system 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 each banners have been clicked, 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 and Yahoo Shopping and Dwango mobile service.
[edit] Current financial condition
As of May 9th, 2008, Nico Nico Douga has had a gross income of approximately 150 million yen. (USD 1.42 million as of May 29th, 2008) 100 million yen (USD 948,000) of that comes from paid premium memberships, 20 million yen (USD 189,760) from their affiliates program, and another 50 million yen (USD 474,400) from advertisements. However, operating the service costs approximately 250 million yen (USD 2.37 million).
[edit] Copyright problems
Like YouTube, Nico Nico Douga has a copyright infringement problem. On October 30th, 2007, Niwango and the JASRAC, Japanese copyright holders' society agreed to form a comprehensive partnership and Niwango will pay 2% of its earnings to JASRAC as copyright royalties.[11].
[edit] References
- ^ Alexa Traffic ranking
- ^ (Japanese) Good Design Award No.07C02037
- ^ ニコニコニュース‐【SP1】H.264、800kbps、容量アップ -SMILEVIDEOの新機能
- ^ (Japanese) ニコニコ動画モバイル. Nico Nico Douga Developer's Blog.
- ^ (Japanese) 登録者300万人突破のお知らせとエコノミーモードについて. Nico Nico Douga Developer's Blog. Retrieved on October 12, 2007.
- ^ (Japanese) ぐだだだなおしらせ. Nico Nico Douga Developer's Blog. Retrieved on October 12, 2007.
- ^ (Japanese) ［速報］ニコニコ動画が機能を大幅に拡大、「ニコンドライフ構想」を発表. CNET Japan. Retrieved on October 12, 2007.
- ^ ニコニコ市場の売り上げは「月3億」
- ^ http://info.dwango.co.jp/pdf/ir/news/2008/080509_ir.pdf
- ^ Yahoo! JAPANとニコニコ動画、協業開始に関する説明会を開催
- ^ ニコニコ動画とYouTube、JASRACに著作権料支払いへ, IT Media, October 30, 2007
[edit] External links
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Douga (SP1) Official Site
- (Traditional Chinese) Nico Nico Douga (SP1) Taiwanese version
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Douga Developer's Blog
- (Japanese) SMILEVIDEO
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Douga Downloader
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Douga wiki
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Ranking wiki
- (Japanese) Nico Nico Pedia
- (English) Research blog about Nico Nico Douga
