niconico, the Site That Invented Bullet Comments, Turns 10 — It Changed the Anime World, and the Real One Too

"Only a free environment can nurture an interesting culture"

niconico Douga, the Japanese site that pioneered bullet-comment video, already celebrated its 10th birthday last December 12. But this March a second round of celebrations broke out on the site. Uploaders made a wave of new videos looking back over the ten years niconico has traveled, and the very first video an ordinary user ever uploaded to niconico was dug up and watched all over again.

These uploaders had a reason to throw a second party four months after the official one. niconico launched on December 12, 2006, but it did not open video uploads to ordinary users until March 6, 2007 — and to uploaders, that is the date that counts as niconico's real anniversary.

Having two birthdays may be exactly part of the site's charm. December 12, the official one, stands for a single side of niconico: it gathered its earliest users by supplying licensed video through Smilevideo, the anime-sharing service run by its parent company, Dwango.

Once uploads opened to ordinary users in March 2007, derivative videos poured in — not only MADs, anime footage re-cut by users, but cover songs and dance videos of every kind. This user-made content deepened niconico's feel as an ACG (anime, comics, games) community, and it is what made niconico unlike any other video site in the world.

At the end of 2016, niconico had 3.31 million daily active users and 2.52 million paying members. To Chinese readers used to a huge market, those numbers alone don't look like much. Bilibili, niconico's chief imitator in China, claimed more than 100 million active users and over a million active uploaders in 2016.

But nobody denies how much Bilibili's success owes to the path niconico laid. Without the bullet comments niconico invented, there would be no Bilibili. Without niconico's live broadcasts, Bilibili might never have opened a livestreaming feature. Without the Chokaigi, niconico's flagship offline event, Bilibili might have waited years longer to launch its own, BML. niconico itself looks small, hemmed in by the size of the Japanese market, but its influence crossed the border long ago.

niconico is ten years old. To understand how it remade our lives step by step, "bullet comments" is probably the best place to start.

People the Internet Split Apart, Bullet Comments Brought Back Together

In television's golden age, people were used to crowding around a set and relishing a program together. Even for content they weren't interested in, or actively disliked, they would sit with a cup of tea, crack sunflower seeds and pass judgment — and when feelings ran high, break into a shouting match.

The internet changed all of that. People retreated into their own rooms to go online alone. Their connection to the world got faster, but they sank into only what they were already into, unwilling to spend time on anything that didn't interest them. That sense of resonance that came from talking about something together slowly disappeared.

Getting people online to watch, together, something they weren't that interested in to begin with became an important motive for Nobuo Kawakami and the others who founded niconico.

"Think about what the real world has that the internet doesn't — it's the 'public square.'" As Dwango founder Nobuo Kawakami saw it, people already had social networks to help them build personal relationships in the virtual world; what niconico wanted to offer was "a scene online resembling a street corner." On a noisy street corner people stand together — strangers to one another, yet watching the same thing, and able to feel an instant flash of recognition.

And so "bullets" began flying across the screen. Bullet comments had arrived.

niconico invented the bullet-comment video site, and bullet comments remain its most recognizable and influential feature. The word began as military jargon: danmaku, a curtain of concentrated fire laid down by many guns or few. Bullet-hell shooting games made the term familiar to ACG fans in Japan, and because the comment function in niconico's player looked like a side-scrolling bullet-hell shooter, that function took the name danmaku — bullet comments.

In the early days, what carried niconico was user-submitted derivative work and music videos, and the comments users left were fairly plain — mostly love or hate for a character or a song, not the wild riffing you see today. Only later, as more licensed video came online, did the discussion culture built on picking apart plot and detail really take shape.

As bullet-comment culture grew, video stopped being the only thing these sites had to attract users. The group feeling, the arguing and the shared reaction generated by the audience became an important "content" of the work itself. There is even a phenomenon now: if the same anime or drama exists in two copies, users pick the one with more comments — the more comments, the hotter the discussion, and the more entertaining the watch. It is as if the comments, not the video, are now the real reason people come to the platform.

Compared with other countries, niconico's bullet-comment culture has cut deeper and wider in China. AcFun, niconico's Chinese imitator, was founded in June 2007; Bilibili was formally established in June 2009. As mainstream video sites — Youku Tudou, LeTV, iQiyi — switched on bullet comments, a culture born on ACG video sites became mass culture on the Chinese internet.

On niconico, Everyone Can Find a Place

On the foundation bullet comments laid, niconico built a sense of community that belonged to ACG users alone. That community did not stay online. The niconico Chokaigi has run for six years, and this huge offline gathering, which brings the site's active uploaders and users together, has become niconico's best calling card.

The Chokaigi's stated purpose is to "recreate everything about niconico in the physical world." The first one drew more than 90,000 people to the venue and 3.47 million livestream viewers; the 2016 edition drew 150,000 on site.

"The concept of the Chokaigi is simple," Takashi Natsuno, a director and board member of niconico's parent company Dwango, said in an interview: "everyone can find their place." Put more simply, the point of the Chokaigi is to show how many different things niconico contains.

At the venue you could see the Chokaigi's liveliest corner, the Super Dancers Zone, where hundreds of people danced at once. At the Shirobako voice-acting event you could step into a recording booth and, with professional equipment and a script prepared by the staff, dub a character you loved. Last year's Chokaigi also staged, for the first time, a new form of kabuki pairing kabuki dancers with Vocaloid characters — Cho Kabuki — a joint new work combining Hatsune Miku's famous song Senbonzakura with Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, one of kabuki's classics, and titled 《今昔飨宴千本樱》 (A Feast of Past and Present: Senbonzakura). Even sumo, the sport the Japanese love, turned up: at the third niconico Chokaigi the organizers held the first Grand Sumo Chokaigi Tournament.

That positioning has not only pulled huge crowds to the Chokaigi; it has for years kept niconico standing out among a crowd of video sites.

"niconico's user base has always skewed toward people in their 20s," Takashi Natsuno said. Go in person and you feel it directly: the uploaders singing and dancing on stage, the eager attendees pressing around the booths — nearly all of them are teenagers or twenty-somethings. "That said, the Chokaigi has also helped the site attract older users by holding sumo matches, shogi games, and, new last year, kabuki performances," he added.

The niconico Chokaigi has another rather unusual tradition: on the final day, the organizers put that year's earnings figure up on screen. When the first Chokaigi ended in 2012, a loss of 470,810,025 yen appeared and set off a heated argument. Even by the fifth edition the event was still losing money every year — but the losses had become an important way for niconico to stay visible.

"For the company, it has already worked as promotion" — in Nobuo Kawakami's words, the Chokaigi not only raised user loyalty but became the best chance to show the outside world that Dwango was running well.

In fact, by its second year niconico was already being labeled "niconico's about done" and "niconico Douga is finished." But the lively scenes at the Chokaigi, and the media coverage that followed, cut the other way: in that atmosphere, people agreed all the more that niconico still held a place in internet culture.

According to 2012 data, 63% of niconico's members were between their teens and their twenties, and 81% of Japanese people in their twenties were niconico users. And where those young people gathered, Sony and other major Japanese brands followed.

Bilibili has held its own "Chokaigi" since 2013 — BML, or Bilibili Macro Link. From 800 people at the first edition to 18,000 last year, BML is now Bilibili's biggest offline event of the year.

BML does not cover as wide a range as the niconico Chokaigi; it leans on uploaders and on song-and-dance sets by idols and singers. Even so, last year's tickets sold out in under two hours, and active uploaders in the dance, gaming and music categories used the event to tie themselves more closely to their fans.

"If one day we look back on this, I think the decision to hold the Chokaigi will prove a very meaningful turning point. We held the first niconico Chokaigi in 2012, and looking back now, the Chokaigi was a necessary move for Dwango at the time." That is how Nobuo Kawakami described his view of the Chokaigi to reporters in 2014.

Want to Know Which Anime Is Popular in Japan Right Now? Just Look at niconico

As a gathering place for ACG culture, niconico has plainly shaped Japan's ACG industry, anime above all: some shows won wide attention and went viral online through niconico rather than through television.

Kemono Friends, the new anime that began airing this January, is the best example. Adapted from a mobile game that had already shut down, it follows an amnesiac human girl who meets Serval, a kemono friend — an animal in human form — and sets off with her for a library to find out who she is. Kemono Friends looked like throwaway moe, and the animation was nothing special, yet it set off fierce discussion on niconico about its plot and its characters.

Eleven episodes in, Kemono Friends had drawn more than 2.7 million bullet comments, the most of any anime in niconico's history, passing the 1.86 million record Puella Magi Madoka Magica set in 2011.

Finished anime is not all of it. niconico has also produced a batch of popular original IP.

Black Rock Shooter began as an original illustrated character that Huke, a member of the Vocaloid doujin circle supercell, posted to Pixiv on December 26, 2007. Soon after, another supercell member, ryo, wrote an original synthesized song for Hatsune Miku based on the character's design. As the song and the design took off on niconico, Good Smile Company promptly bought the development rights and put out a figure.

Before long this illustrated character — whom many mistook for a "dark" Hatsune Miku — got an anime of her own: the Japanese studios Ordet and Sanzigen jointly produced an original TV series, and Black Rock Shooter aired in 2012.

Even part of LoveLive!'s popularity is owed to niconico: on the site's livestreaming platform, the voice-actress group kept up a steady exchange with fans through live shows and built its following. Without a platform like niconico — closer to young people's tastes, and open to unrestrained mockery — a comedy anime as full of deliberately broken animation as KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World! would have struggled to become last January's dark horse.

niconico has made openings for these original creators, and it has become an important channel for the anime business to understand its audience — to work out what anime and what content young people actually want.

Virtual Singers, Otaku Dance, MADs: All Kinds of New Things Were Born Here

"Hatsune Miku is the first character raised up by users themselves, and she won't be forgotten even a hundred years from now." Nobuo Kawakami said this with complete confidence, and he was not exaggerating.

The virtual singer with the leek-green twintails was born almost in step with niconico's rise. On August 31, 2007, Crypton Future Media released Hatsune Miku, a virtual female vocal software, and later gave her a futuristic, moe look. Type a melody and lyrics into the software and this sweet-voiced virtual singer would "sing" a synthesized song for you. By the end of September 2007 there were already more than 2,000 Miku videos on niconico.

Miku's real breakout was her cover of the Finnish folk song Ievan Polkka, known as the Leek Song, which quickly reached a million plays on niconico. After that, original songs made with voice-synthesis software flourished on the platform too, some of them good enough to match professional work. Miku became a genuinely popular singer in her own right: she started releasing physical albums and giving holographic concerts around the world. By March 2012 the economic value she had generated topped 10 billion yen.

As Nobuo Kawakami saw it: "Only a free environment can nurture an interesting culture." niconico looked too "free" at the start, but it was these passionate creators who produced the community culture it has now.

After music producers uploaded synthesized songs to niconico, other music fans covered those original Vocaloid songs in their own voices, and users skilled at instruments played them on instruments instead. Another group used MMD, a 3-D animation tool, to make original CG videos, interpreting the same Vocaloid songs a different way. Then the dancers arrived, choreographing routines to those songs and uploading the results under the category odotte mita — "I tried dancing it" — what China usually calls otaku dance.

MADs, too, became content users uploaded to niconico in bulk. MAD stands for Music Anime Dōga, a form of derivative work that mainly edits existing footage or audio and sets it to a favorite piece of music. It has spawned subgenres: healing MADs, hype MADs and others. niconico also runs MAD contests for users — in 2015, for instance, it held a still-image MAD contest around the hit anime One Punch Man, and the winner took home 100,000 yen.

The subculture rising on niconico was soon carried into China by ACG fans. Beyond re-uploading videos, Chinese users tried cover songs and cover dances of their own, and started using software to make their own songs and animation.

These chain reactions drove the subculture's flowering, and niconico became, naturally, the world's earliest source of ACG-subculture video. Without all this spontaneous creation by users on the platform, neither niconico nor the niconico Chokaigi could have carried on.

Politicians Need niconico Too

A fair number of people still hold the stereotype that "niconico = ACG = fanatical otaku." Open the site and you find far more than that. Along with new-season anime, gaming videos, TV dramas and films, sports and much else, there is a conspicuous politics section, and quite a few politicians have opened channels on it.

As early as 2007, not long after the site launched, niconico invited some of the era's most contentious politicians — Muneo Suzuki, Koichi Toyama, Ichiro Ozawa and others — to upload personal videos to the site, so they could talk with otaku who looked indifferent to politics.

niconico has never hidden its appetite for politics. In 2009, Taro Aso invited Yukio Hatoyama, leader of the Democratic Party, to the first party-leader debate on niconico's live-broadcast platform. On November 29, 2012, a more "ambitious" plan arrived on the platform: niconico invited the leaders of ten parties — every party except the Japan Restoration Party and the New Renaissance Party — to a discussion. Hosted by Dwango, the parties would debate the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), the consumption tax and nuclear power live on air.

The biggest draw was that Yoshihiko Noda, then Japan's prime minister, and Shinzo Abe would go head to head that day. Noda declined the proposal at first, but Abe soon wrote on his own Facebook page that he would "take on Prime Minister Noda live on niconico," arguing that a television broadcast would raise questions of program editing and fairness, while niconico was "the fairest venue for reflecting the views of viewers on both sides."

More than 1.4 million people watched the debate, and user comments passed 500,000. The response ran far beyond what the organizers had expected. Seiji Sugimoto, president of Niwango, told the Asahi Shimbun in a December 2012 interview: "Until now, most people inside the company thought that a program of roughly one to two hours drawing 100,000 viewers would already be impressive. So this time you could call it 'extraordinary.' Japan's population is about 100 million, so the program's viewership rate was about 1.4%. Our site isn't like television, where you can watch across 'multiple' channels — our viewers click actively and selectively, and in that sense our video site is now on a par with television."

Quite a few politicians consider niconico "a video site with a strong slant," but Sugimoto insists that what they provide is a neutral environment that takes no position. "Our aim is to give citizens who hold their own political views an open platform where they can speak up — and we haven't gone out of our way to advertise ourselves as fair and impartial either."

niconico Opened Up Japan's Video Market. What About Its Future?

"When niconico Douga first launched, I actually thought, 'As long as it lasts five years, that's fine.'" Nobuo Kawakami then added: "niconico Douga was developed in the first place as a service to compete with YouTube, and we had planned from the start that this competition would be settled in about five years."

Most people didn't believe at the start that niconico could hold on — Kawakami included. It is now in its eleventh year.

YouTube entered the Japanese market in 2006. That same year, on December 12, niconico launched. By the end of January 2007, a little over a month online, users had posted more than 5 million bullet comments and watched videos more than 100 million times. By 2008, niconico was the sixth most-visited of Japan's domestic sites.

niconico moved fast, above all on getting users to pay: in June 2007 it launched a paid membership, offering higher-definition video and full-speed buffering among other perks. By the following month it had more than 54,000 paying members and more than 2 million registered IDs.

In 2010, niconico became the first video site in Japan to turn a profit. As of March 2010 it had 16.34 million monthly logins, 736,000 paying users at 525 yen a month, and 4.94 million registered users. March revenue was 1.428 billion yen against 1.399 billion yen in costs — its first profitable month. Paid memberships supplied 69.6% of that revenue and advertising 18.7%.

"Making money from official livestreams, turning the company from loss to profit through paid membership — these were things the outside world used to think we could never pull off. But we tried, and somehow it worked." Looking back, Nobuo Kawakami still finds it a little unbelievable.

China's AcFun and Bilibili, by comparison, have been extremely cautious about charging for membership; the paid "Premium Member" system Bilibili announced last year now exists in name only.

But at the key moment of its tenth anniversary, niconico got some unwelcome news. According to results from the end of December 2016, niconico had 2.52 million paying members, 40,000 fewer than the 2.56 million of the second quarter — the first time its paying-member count had ever fallen. Average monthly active users fell from an earlier 9.54 million to 9.19 million, and average daily active users from 3.46 million to 3.31 million.

Hardware is still a large problem for niconico. Next to a stable YouTube, niconico's system buckles easily because it cannot carry its load. Meanwhile, as global video services such as Netflix and Hulu have entered Japan, their high-definition exclusive licensed titles and original programming have inevitably hit niconico hard.

Takashi Natsuno's answer, in an interview: "We are not fighting YouTube, and we are not fighting any other platform." Their users, he said, still use Google's video service and sites like Facebook. He did acknowledge one thing: niconico needs to change, with those platforms as its reference.

Cover image from: i.ytimg.com, i.gzn.jp, deviantart