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