ニコニコ神社 (Niconico Jinja)

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

~ the last words ~

The announcement is still up, which is the best thing about this one. On 12 February 2009 Niconico's news blog ran a post headlined with a prayer for going into the black, explaining that premium memberships were growing nicely, helped along by Billy Herrington's visit to Japan, but that the road to actual profitability remained steep. Hiroyuki Nishimura's suggestion, the post says, was that this might be a situation where you want supernatural assistance. So they built a shrine in the bottom-left corner of the front page.

The post is pleased with itself about the engineering. It describes the shrine as a big project that tied up a dream team of Dwango's top-class engineers for the enormously long period, as it puts it, of two whole days. Readers were then invited to go and worship, for Niconico turning a profit or for Dwango's share price, or for whatever they were privately after. Then comes the sentence that turns a joke into a product. To worship, you need to draw a fortune slip, and that costs 100 Niconico Points.

~ the record ~

~ a hundred points a draw ~

Niconico Points were the site's own currency, bought with real money and otherwise spent on channel subscriptions and in-app items. A hundred of them was not a large sum. It was also not nothing, and the thing it bought was an omikuji, the paper fortune you pay a few coins for at a real shrine. The announcement promises it will read your luck anywhere from great blessing down to great curse, in plain wording with no decoration on it.

Look at what is being sold here. A video site that was losing money put a collection box on its own homepage and told its users the money was for praying that the site would stop losing money. Japanese shrines have taken coins for omikuji for centuries and nobody finds that strange. Doing it on a web page, for the benefit of the web page, is a different proposition, and in early 2009 it was a fairly direct joke about how Niconico's finances looked.

~ the week it lasted ~

Niconico's own service list gives the dates as 12 February to 18 February 2009, which makes the shrine six days old when it closed. No closure notice survives and no reason was published for it. Two days of a dream team's time bought six days of service. The 2009 announcement post is still live and still carries the original text, with a row of dashes and a single line added underneath: the Niconico Shrine has finished, thank you for using it. That is the only tombstone the thing ever got, and it is sitting at the bottom of its own birth announcement.

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