Niconico Douga SP1 and its expanding reach

Niconico Douga Logo (SP1)
Niwango hold a press conference about its Niconico Douga‘s update release “SP1” (upgraded from “RC2”) on March 5th 13:00 (JST).
Niconico Douga Press Conference 2008-03-05

Current statistics of Niconico Douga provided by director Seiji Sugimoto:

  • 5.6 million registered users
  • 1.14 million of users using cellularphone version
  • 189 thousands paid users
  • listed on NTT Docomo’s i-mode official site
  • Ads sale in Feb 2008: 32 million yen
  • Sales from Niconico Ichiba(market) in Feb: 86 million yen
  • Copyright holder partners: 38 companies
  • under discussion with JASRAC

Niconico Douga has 5.6 million users

New features by Hiroyuki Nishimura:

  • Niconico Movie Maker free tool given out to encourage potential movie creators
  • H.264 support
  • Top page design renewal
  • My profile page added
  • Provides widget to other blog service providers and social networking services, starting with livedoor blog, Hatena Diary, So-net blog and trunc
  • Mini-games on movies with score ranking
  • Enhanced “Nico-script” for clickable link, comment-suppression, poll functions on top of current jump function, on March 13th
  • Niconico News Maker : CGM news, in April
  • Niconico Dai Hyakka : CGM encyclopedia, in April

President Hiroshi Kobayashi talked that their Niconico Douga business is still in red, but improving supported by advertisement/affiliate. They haven’t touched mobile version ads yet so it is being planned toward profitable.
Japanese geek’s portal Hatena announced its joining hands with Niconico Douga by allowing new embeddable Niconico-Douga-video widget on its diary(blog) service. (You may see kitten video with Niconico-comments without Niconico-account on the annonunce page)
[update 2008-03-19] Vox supports Niconico Douga Widget. As Vox is an international service, now it is possible to show Niconico Douga widgets in non-Japanese blog.

See also:

Niconico douga | Asiajin
Niconico-Douga expressed its Taiwan version begins next week | Asiajin
Some Niconico-douga videos available without registration | Asiajin
Tokyotronic: How to register for Nico Nico Douga
Photo by shike@current. Thanks.

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