Nico Nico Douga

Niconico, Inc.

Type of site	Video hosting service
Available in	Japanese, English, Chinese
Owner	Dwango
Created by	Niwango
Website	www.nicovideo.jp
Alexa rank	78 (January 2016[update])
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Yes
Launched	December 12, 2006
Current status	Active

Niconico (ニコニコ, Nikoniko^?, lit. "Smile"), formerly known as Nico Nico Douga (ニコニコ動画, Niko Niko Dōga^?, lit. "Smiley Smiley Video") or "Nico-dō" for short, is a video sharing website in Japan managed by Dwango. "Niconico" or "nikoniko" is the Japanese ideophone for smiling. As of September 2015, Niconico is the eighth most visited website in Japan. The site won the Japanese Good Design Award in 2007, and an Honorary Mention of the Digital Communities category at Prix Ars Electronica 2008.

Users can upload, view and share video clips. Unlike other video sharing sites, however, comments are overlaid directly onto the video, synced to a specific playback time. This allows comments to respond directly to events occurring in the video, in sync with the viewer—creating a sense of a shared watching experience. Together with Hiroyuki Nishimura serving as director at Niwango until February 2013, Niconico's atmosphere and cultural context is close to 2channel's or Futaba Channel's, and many popular videos have otaku tastes, such as anime, computer games and pop music. Niconico offers tagging of videos. Tags may be edited by any user, not just the uploader. Each video may have up to ten tags, of which up to five may be optionally locked by the uploader, but all others may be edited by any user. Frequently these tags are used not only as categorization, but also as critical commentary, satire, or other humor related to the video's content. The site is also known for its MAD videos and its medleys of popular songs on the website, most notably Kumikyoku Nico Nico Douga. Certain original net animations have been distributed on the website, such as Candy Boy, Tentai Senshi Sunred and Penguin Musume Heart.

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