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|---|---|
| URL | http://www.nicovideo.jp/ |
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Video hosting service |
| Registration | Yes |
| Available language(s) | Japanese, Traditional Chinese, German and Spanish |
| Owner | Niwango |
| Created by | Niwango |
| Launched | December 12, 2006 |
| Current status | Active |
Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画 Niko Niko Dōga, lit. "Smiley videos") is a popular video sharing website in Japan managed by Niwango, a subsidiary of Dwango.[1] 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.[2] The site won the Japanese Good Design Award in 2007,[3] and an Honorary Mention of the Digital Communities category at Prix Ars Electronica 2008.[4]
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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. 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 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.
Other features include:
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. 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.[5]
As of September 19, 2009, Nico Nico Douga has over 14,000,000 registered users and 500,000 premium users.[6] 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 the majority of the site traffic is from Japan, although approximately four percent is from outside of Japan, notably one percent from Taiwan.[7] A Taiwanese version of the site was launched on October 18, 2007.[8] In July 2008, the website was localized to German and Spanish.[9]
The main income of Nico Nico Douga is divided into three parts: Premium-Membership (Pay-membership), Advertisement, and Nico Nico Ichiba (Affiliate).[10][11][12]
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 (about US$5) a month. As of December 12, 2009, there are 600,000 premium members.
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 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 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, Yahoo Shopping, and Dwango mobile service.
Premium accounts and the affiliate system are currently only available to Japanese users. Non-Japanese users can apply for a premium membership on the Japanese site with international cards, language barrier notwithstanding.
As of May 9, 2008, Nico Nico Douga has had a gross income of approximately 170 million yen (US$1.42 million as of May 29, 2008), where 100 million yen (US$948,000) of that comes from paid premium memberships, 20 million yen (US$189,760) from their affiliates program, and another 50 million yen (US$474,400) from advertisements. However, operating the service costs approximately 250 million yen (US$2.37 million).
Nico Nico Douga has a copyright infringement problem. On October 30, 2007, Niwango and the JASRAC, Japanese copyright holders' society agreed to form a comprehensive partnership and Niwango will pay two percent of its earnings to JASRAC as copyright royalties.[13] 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.
   | Good Design Award No.07C02037 - Good Design Award |
| | Alexa Traffic ranking - nicovideo.jp - Traffic Details from Alexa |
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