The author | Li Wenfeng
Editor | Crab Boss
As the originator of the bullet screen website, Niconico Animation (hereinafter referred to as N station), which inspired China's AB two stations, is gradually disappearing from the vision of Chinese netizens in recent years. Occasionally, it appears, but it only appears in the historical development of the public discussion station B, as a background for information.
Born in 2006, N Station once registered 60 million members and paid members of more than 2.5 million people, and was once a video site that could achieve profitability throughout the year.
The "bullet screen function" originated from the N station and the massive Up main secondary creation have created countless brillianties for it, which not only inspired the establishment of the two AB stations in China, but also attracted many Japanese young people to submit articles here, including the singer Yonezu Genshi who later became a fire, and won many well-known IPs including Hatsune Mirai and Oriental Project.
However, the good times did not last long, since 2016, there have been a series of problems in the N station, resulting in a decline in the number of paid members. According to the latest financial report of Kadokawa Group, although the effective registered members of N Station are currently as high as 80.17 million, the actual paid membership scale has only fallen to 1.61 million, and it is difficult to have a rebound momentum.
According to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the Kadokawa Group lost 4.3 billion yen in fiscal 2018 (April 2018 to March 2019), and the important reason for the deficit was the sluggish game projects of its parent company, N Stations, multi-play countries, and the sharp decrease in paid memberships of N Stations.
This huge loss led to the resignation of both Tsuneyoshi Kawakami, then president of the Kadokawa Group, and Takashi Araki, then president of Takumiku. But the turmoil of management is not the end, another value of attention is that users on the N station began to have an "aging" tendency.
Kadokawa Group's latest annual report shows that 70% of the users under the age of 40 in the N station, of which 40% are in the 10-30 age group, and the monthly active volume is 6.46 million. These data seem to be good, but if compared with four years, in 2016, N station users accounted for about 53% of the 10-30 age group, and the monthly active life was as high as 8.68 million. As an N station that was once loved by young people, its appeal to Japan's Generation Z is declining.
According to the data of the Institute of Social Research, under the 74.9% awareness rate of N Station, only 10.1% of users use it monthly (at least once in January); while the monthly usage rate of YouTube users is as high as 65.4%, and the gap between the two sides in the Japanese market has widened by 6.5 times.
This also makes the outside world deeply curious: what is the factor that makes this former two-dimensional overlord lose the love of young users as the core? What are the warnings and reference significance for domestic A and B stations?
N station ups and downs
In 2006, the Japanese game company Takashi created "パケラジ2.0" based on YouTube, which was later renamed NicoNico Animation.
Also as a UGC website, compared with YouTube, Japan's N station has become a holy place for two-dimensional users and embarked on a unique path. Two-dimensional enthusiasts gather here to create and build a unique cultural trend, including MAD, virtual Katsuhime Hatsune Mirai, various fandom videos, and otaku culture.
In December 2009, under the implementation of the "premium member" charging system and advertising and other measures, N station achieved a single month profit. At the final account presentation meeting the following year, Xia Yegang, who was a director, said with great pride: "The profitability of user-contributed video websites is unheard of in the world, and N station is the first case." ”
On October 1, 2014, KADOKAWA Co., Ltd. (Kadokawa Group) and Takukoku Co., Ltd. merged to operate, and KADOKAWA DWANGO was born. The following year, the number of registered users of N station exceeded 50 million, and the number of paid users reached more than 2.5 million.
However, this merger and reorganization did not bring a bigger stage to N station, but in 2016, the number of paid users of N station reached a record high of 2.56 million, and it began to decline.
The contradiction between N stations and users is also becoming increasingly prominent: many users feedback that the experience of using N stations after landing is getting worse and worse, and there are serious problems with video quality and fluency. Although it has tens of millions of registered members, N station has been criticized for neglecting to upgrade bandwidth and servers, and once the users become more, watching videos on N station has become a rather painful experience.
To this end, N station had planned to launch a new version of "niconico (く)" to solve this problem, but for some reason, the iteration of the new version was repeatedly postponed. Until a year later, in 2017, the N station finally held a new version conference, but the impatient Japanese users have long since stopped appreciating it. On the N-station screen at the press conference site, it was full of all kinds of "completely unsolved" "What is he talking about?" "Waiting for the barrage, at one point, made the atmosphere of the scene very awkward.
(The scene of the press conference full of doubts)
But then, most users are still disappointed to find that the problems of N station video quality and latency have not been solved. Behind this incident, what is exposed is the N station's calculations in cost input and commercial acquisition, and suffers from gains and losses. For the contradiction of user feedback on the poor viewing experience, the solution given by N station is: kryptonite gold. Let paid members have a smooth playback experience.
The poor viewing experience accelerated the departure of many users, and even many premium members of N station (540 yen per month including tax) fell sharply by 360,000 people in 2017.
Through the kadokawa Group's report for fiscal year 2017, it can be observed that although sales increased by 0.5% over the previous quarter, operating profit decreased by 62.6%, and it was N Station, which undertook the company's Web services business, that dragged the overall hind legs.
In the subsequent fiscal year 2018, Kadokawa Group's sales decreased by 10.4% from the opening forecast to 207 billion yen; operating profit decreased by 76.3% year-on-year to 1.9 billion yen; and overall there was a deficit of 4.3 billion yen.
Two consecutive years of declining performance led to the resignation of Tsuneyoshi Kawakami, then president of the Kadokawa Group, and Ryuji Araki, then president of Takumikoku. Although the subsequent interim results of fiscal 2019 have recovered and Station N has resumed profitability, it has not fundamentally reversed the decline of this old two-dimensional website.
Because the new management's solution to the loss of N station is mainly achieved by cutting costs. In order to save money, Station N permanently closed the ten-year-old NicoNico headquarters and the LIVE space Nico Faire in Roppongi for live broadcasts and events.
But how N station to save its Z generation young users, still has not been solved.
Through the data officially released by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the outside world can observe that the N station is not only far behind YouTube, YouTube has reached a staggering 90% or more use rate among young users aged 10-20 and 20-30 years old, while N station is only used by one-third of Japanese young people. Among Japanese users in the 10-20 age range, the use rate of N station is even less than that of TIKTOK.
N station abandoned by the Up Master
In the face of the increasing decline in the traffic of N stations in recent years, Niconico President Kurita admitted that it is the communication between N stations and users that has had problems in recent years.
"Originally, A close relationship was established between N stations and users, but in recent years, there has been a gap. It's all because we're not thoughtful enough. Kurita's "not thoughtful enough" is actually the old and difficult video playback interface of N station, and the poor picture quality.
Different from the business model of Station B, the revenue sources of Station N are mainly through: NicoNico Channel (video content), NicoNico Super Conference (offline activities), NicoNico Live Broadcast (Live Broadcasting) these businesses.
Previously, live video broadcasts such as games, virtual anchors, singing, horse racing and most of the animation dramas on N stations were almost all paid to watch. On some free videos, users don't need to be buffered for long, only paid members can fast-forward or rewind the progress bar of the video, and free members can only see low-quality videos.
This almost forced purchase of membership squeezed out most of the free members. As a result, the traffic of N station has been greatly reduced, which in turn has affected the group of Up masters, the enthusiasm of contributors has decreased significantly, the quality of the content of submissions has also begun to decline, and the number of users who are willing to pay for money has become smaller. This vicious circle has become the biggest headache problem at the moment.
Many Up owners have switched to YouTube, which not only far exceeds the daily active volume of N stations, but also far better than N stations in terms of revenue for Up owners.
In 2019, some N station users asserted that the fate of niconico animation will end in two or three years. Many Japanese netizens lamented that the feature that was once advertised on the N station as "there are a bunch of interesting videos" has long gone.
In June this year, Soraru, as the head of N station Up, said bluntly in a conversation with N station president Kurida that the biggest reason why he still insists on submitting articles on N station is because there is still a group of fans who "hope you can also vote for NicoNico". To put it very realistically, N stations and YouTube are less played and more difficult to increase fans. Therefore, there are not a few voices calling on up owners to stop submitting.
Many people around soraru were surprised that he was still submitting articles on the N station, and advised him: "When are you going to submit articles on the N station?" The head Up owner also admitted: "If this situation continues, I think more people will leave NicoNico." ”
In addition to the unsatisfactory number of plays, another reason why N station Up owners switched to YouTube is that it is difficult for creators to get satisfactory commercial returns on N stations.
By joining the YouTube Collaborator Program, you can monetize advertising, subscription tips, and more. YouTube uses the CPM metric, that is, "cost per thousand times", the cost of creators per thousand ad impressions, the higher the CPM, the higher the cost of advertising, the higher the cost of the creator. This allows creators to harvest a certain fee according to the popularity of the video, which greatly mobilizes the enthusiasm of creators.
In order to save users and Up owners, N station has also formulated many similar policies.
In an interview in June, Kurita said that NicoNico itself earns a steady and secure income from paid memberships. A portion of the membership fee is allocated to contributors in the Creator Rewards program, and fees can also be charged on the NicoNico channel. At the same time, in order to make it easier for the Up masters to make secondary creations. NicoNico also prepared a mechanism whereby the "sub-works" of the second creation were more popular, and the more the "parent works" could receive more revenue.
Kurita likens the popularity of the Up lord to a pyramid, and the creators of the spire are more likely to get huge views on Google-run YouTube. However, he said that for some newcomers, it is easier to succeed in N stations at the beginning.
"In the N station submission, the creator of the pyramid waist has more advantages, and there will be more cases than YouTube broadcast. Station N also has tag search skills to filter songs, and you can also arrange them in various orders such as the latest contributions and the most played. Therefore, in recent years, many users have no one to watch on YouTube, and the number of plays has not gone, and the number of plays has increased suddenly after coming to N station. ”
Behind Kurita's remarks, after constantly making mistakes and being marginalized, N Station, who was once the king of the second dimension, has become helpless to pick some youtube indigestible residues and barely survive.
This once most popular bullet screen website for young people is no longer glamorous. Also stimulated N station began to make some changes, some live broadcasts also began to no longer harshly limit non-paying users, in order to improve the picture quality, N station finally began to upgrade servers and bandwidth.
However, these late changes may come too late, and the loss of the user base of N station has not been fundamentally solved.
But even if the N station becomes outdated, it is no longer so trendy. It is still the largest two-dimensional bullet screen website in Japan, and there are no competitors in the Japanese domestic market except youtube. This may be an important reason why N station has stuck to the rules over the years.
Due to the impact of Japan's new coronavirus self-isolation, the number of recent video submissions of N station even returned to the number of 2016 periods.
But these are temporary. Will the future N station be eliminated within 2 to 3 years as predicted by users, or will it regain the favor of the younger generation of Japanese users with subsequent changes? There are still huge variables in everything.