Nico Nico Douga

About

Nico Nico Douga (Japanese: ニコニコ動画, which means “Smile Videos”) is a Japanese video sharing website well-known for its large video remixing community and the real-time display of user comments during the playback. The site was founded by the Japanese media company Dwango, which also manages the imageboard community 2chan.

History

Launched on December 12th, 2006, the earliest form of Nico Nico Douga relied on YouTube as its video-hosting service. But as the community continued to grow in traffic and bandwidth usage, YouTube blocked access from Nico Nico Douga beginning on February 23rd, 2007. Consequently, the site was forced to shut down the service but it was relaunched as “Nico Nico Douga Y” with its own video-hosting server less than a month later in March. In May 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. Its nickname is “Niconico” or “Nico-dō”, where “nikoniko” is the Japanese ideophone for smiling.

Features

Nico Nico Douga was the first website introduce a way to embed tags and comments directly into the videos, allowing comments on 2channel and the YouTube clip to be displayed simultaneously. The feature enabled video posts on Nico Nico Douga with a sense of a shared watching experience.

Traffic

From Wikipedia:

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. 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. Nico Nico Douga is the thirteenth most visited website in Japan.

Related Memes

For the complete listing of memes originating from Nico Nico Douga, check out KYM Collection – Nico Nico Douga.

External References

^[1] Nico Nico Douga – ニコニコ動画

^[2] Wikipedia – ニコニコ動画