ニコニコ市場 (Niconico Ichiba)

» see ichiba.nicovideo.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Niconico went up in December 2006, and the thing people came for was the comments scrolling over the picture rather than the picture. Niconico Ichiba, which translates as the Niconico marketplace, was one of the answers. It opened on 12 July 2007 as a provisional build for premium members, carrying Amazon products only, and what it did was hang a shelf of items along the bottom of the watch page.

What gave it any value at all was who stocked the shelf. Viewers did. If a video featured something you could buy, somebody watching would attach that product to the page, and the next person to arrive would find it sitting there. The catalog widened past Amazon over the years to Yahoo! Shopping and the iTunes Store, along with Ticket Pia and Dwango's own shops, and the widget could be dropped into Niconico Daihyakka and the live broadcasts as well as the video pages.

I have never had a Niconico account. The comment-over-video format reached me as a thing other people described rather than a thing I used, partly because the interface never left Japanese and partly because my video habit had already settled on YouTube. What Ichiba represents is still legible from outside: a shop whose inventory was written by the audience, bolted to the bottom of a page they had no other reason to scroll down to.

~ the record ~

~ the strip under the player ~

Mechanically it was an affiliate widget, and Dwango never pretended otherwise. The money came from referral fees. What kept it from reading like advertising was that the operator did not choose the stock, so the shelf under a video filled up with whatever the people watching thought belonged there, which in practice meant a running joke as often as a purchase suggestion.

There was even a feature for that. You could push a one-line comment across a product image, so the merchandise got the same treatment as the video above it. The shelf was also portable: blog parts let the thing be embedded outside Niconico entirely, which is how a video site's shopping strip ended up on other people's pages.

~ the pizza command ~

On 1 April 2008, Niwango turned on a feature where typing @pizza into the comment box of a video opened a Domino's ordering page in a separate window. The comment still scrolled across the video like any other, so you announced your order to everyone watching. It ran through Domino's network of 181 branches concentrated around Kanto and Kansai, with LinkShare Japan handling the affiliate side, and the pizza corner lived inside Ichiba.

The pizza page then did the thing that makes the whole episode memorable. It published yesterday's pizza count alongside a ranking of which videos had moved the most pizza, and it ran a feed of every comment carrying the command. A video site had built itself a leaderboard of which uploads made people hungry.

~ cleared for a redesign ~

The standalone Ichiba site shut on 29 January 2020, and the shelf carried on inside the watch page for almost four years after that. On 15 September 2023 Dwango announced that it had started reviewing the design of the PC watch page, and that ahead of any of that work Niconico Ichiba would stop being provided on 30 November. The stated aim of the rebuild was to put the player at the center and gather the scattered support features into one place.

Niconico had turned sixteen the previous December and renamed its version eR, with a line about creators and the people cheering them on all being leads in the same story. Ichiba was a casualty of that tidying. It was the oldest thing on the page by then. A row of Amazon links had occupied that spot since 2007, and a row of Amazon links was what came down.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »