Key Points
ใปAccording to KADOKAWA’s first-quarter earnings materials for the fiscal year ending March 2027, published on August 13, 2026, Niconico had 893,000 premium members as of June 30, 2026, down from 994,000 a year earlier.
ใปThe same figure of roughly 900,000 was reported in 2010 as a milestone on the way up, when Niconico passed one million premium members three years after launching the paid tier.
ใปNiconico lost the contest over scale and creator earnings, and the thing it built that no other service has replicated is the comment layer that turns watching into a shared act.
โผ Watch this article as a video
The 893,000 Figure in a Quarterly Earnings Deck
KADOKAWA published its first-quarter earnings presentation for the fiscal year ending March 2027 on August 13, 2026, disclosing that Niconico had 893,000 premium members as of June 30, 2026. The company had disclosed 994,000 for June 30, 2025 in the equivalent materials a year earlier, making the decline about 101,000 over twelve months. Japanese online media reported the number as Niconico “falling below 900,000 paying members.”
In the same materials, the company attributed flat revenue for its Niconico-related business to higher attendance and sponsor exhibition sales at Niconico Chokaigi 2026, which offset the drop in paid membership. The materials give no explanation for why membership fell.
On August 1, ahead of the earnings release, Dwango raised the monthly price of a premium membership from 790 yen to 990 yen, citing rising costs for systems and facilities, content procurement and security. Subscriptions billed through Apple Account and Google Play were left at the old price. The 893,000 figure predates the increase.
KADOKAWA also disclosed 109.78 million active accounts including free IDs, and 982,000 paid monthly subscribers to Niconico Channels, in the same August 2026 presentation.
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What Niconico Is, and What a Premium Membership Buys
Niconico (ใใณใใณๅ็ป) is a Japanese video-sharing platform launched in December 2006, best known for danmaku comments, viewer remarks that scroll horizontally across the video image itself in sync with playback time. A premium membership is its paid tier, introduced in June 2007, which historically removed restrictions rather than adding features.
The users are growing and the payers are shrinking
Two numbers in the same earnings deck move in opposite directions.
According to KADOKAWA’s August 2026 materials, active accounts including free IDs reached 109.78 million as of June 30, 2026, and have risen every quarter for the past two years. What has fallen is the count of people paying every month.
The business result also runs against the membership headline. According to the same materials, Web Services segment revenue for April to June 2026 rose 0.3 percent year on year. In KADOKAWA’s mid-term plan review published in May 2026, Web Services was the only one of five segments projected to beat its target, at 133 percent of plan.
The company credits Chokaigi attendance and sponsor exhibition sales for filling the gap. KADOKAWA disclosed 303,000 paid monthly members for its fan-community service sheeta as of June 30, 2026, and in-person attendance at Chokaigi has risen for three consecutive years, reaching 138,000 in 2026.
The decline is not limited to the premium tier. According to the same series of KADOKAWA disclosures, paid monthly subscribers to Niconico Channels fell from 1.25 million at the end of March 2024 to 982,000, a drop of roughly 20 percent in two years and three months.
Sixteen years changed what 900,000 means
The same number once described an ascent.
Niconico launched the premium tier in June 2007. Contemporary news reports put it at 800,000 members in May 2010, 900,000 that August, and past one million in October 2010. At that point 900,000 was a waypoint.
| Date | Premium members |
|---|---|
| June 2007 | Paid tier launched |
| August 2010 | 900,000 |
| October 2010 | 1,000,000 |
| June 2013 | 2,000,000 |
| July 2015 | 2,500,000 |
| March 2016 | 2,560,000 (peak) |
| March 2019 | 1,800,000 |
| March 2022 | 1,400,000 |
| March 2024 | 1,170,000 |
| March 2025 | 989,000 |
| March 2026 | 932,000 |
| June 2026 | 893,000 |
Figures through 2016 come from press releases and reporting based on earnings summaries; figures from March 2019 onward are quarter-end values disclosed in KADOKAWA’s earnings presentations. Disclosure precision also changed around the one-million mark, from round units to one decimal place in units of ten thousand, so the two halves of the table are not strictly one series.
The pace of decline varies. The largest single-quarter drop was 81,000 between December 2024 and March 2025, which KADOKAWA’s fiscal 2025 full-year materials attribute to churn following the suspension of credit card payments. Regarding the June 2024 ransomware attack that took Niconico offline for roughly two months, KADOKAWA stated in its November 2024 materials that the effect on membership was almost nil; the damage landed on revenue instead, at 3.95 billion yen for the year.
The quarter-end figures KADOKAWA has disclosed show the most recent quarter falling by 39,000, against roughly 20,000 in each of the three preceding quarters. The rate is accelerating rather than flattening.
A service designed to be watched together
What Niconico won in the late 2000s came from letting viewers into the video rather than from showing them one.
The service launched in December 2006. Hatsune Miku went on sale at the end of August 2007, and posting and viewing began pulling each other forward. An ITmedia article from September 2007 described the widening base of amateur music production on Niconico, reporting that nearly 3,000 units had sold including pre-orders within a month of release, an unusual figure for music software at the time.
Game commentary videos grew in the same period. By January 2015, roughly 5.28 million of Niconico’s approximately 11.77 million uploaded videos were game-related, according to reporting at the time.
The premium membership sat on a different logic from a modern subscription. Its value came from removing inconvenience: economy mode degraded video quality during busy hours for free users, and free accounts could be shut out of crowded live broadcasts. Paying bought a way past those limits.
On that basis the business turned profitable in the January to March quarter of 2010, with roughly 75 percent of revenue reported as coming from premium memberships. Niconico reached profitability on viewer payments, before advertising, and that shaped everything that followed.
Three Reasons That Compounded, and What Survived Them
Why Niconico fell years behind on video quality
The gap in image quality and performance traces to capital, not to inattention.
YouTube announced 1080p support in November 2009. Niconico put 1080p into full operation in January 2018, a gap of about eight years and two months. Free accounts gained the ability to broadcast live on YouTube in December 2013 and on Niconico in August 2019, a gap of five years and eight months.
The origin is February 2007. Niconico at that point layered comments over videos hosted on YouTube, and when YouTube cut off its access, the service shut down and restarted on infrastructure it had to build and own. Three months after launch, it was a company paying for its own video delivery.
From then on, the cost of upgrading that infrastructure was funded by monthly payments from viewers. According to ITmedia’s May 2017 report on KADOKAWA’s earnings, the Web Services business posted lower profit for the year ending March 2017, with higher image quality, HTML5 support and infrastructure rebuilding cited among the causes.
The mismatch surfaced publicly in 2017. Dwango announced in April that a new version called “ku” would ship in October. At the rescheduled presentation on November 28, chairman Nobuo Kawakami said the poor image quality compared with other services was a serious problem whose fix ran deep and would take time, and announced a further delay. Kawakami apologized on November 30 for having neglected the basics, and Shigetaka Kurita took over as head of the service in December.
The criticism concentrated on the inconsistency rather than on the feature list. Membership had already been falling before that presentation: according to ITmedia’s report from the same period, premium membership stood at 2.28 million at the end of September 2017, down from 2.56 million a year earlier. What the episode did was make an existing outflow, and the distance between management and users, visible to everyone at once.
Why creators moved to YouTube even though monetization came earlier at Niconico
The difference was in where the money came from.
Niconico launched its Creator Incentive Program in December 2011, several months before YouTube opened monetization to general users in Japan in April 2012. According to ITmedia’s April 2015 report, the incentive paid about 0.29 yen per view, and the total pool was roughly 600 million yen for 2014, funded out of premium fees and a portion of advertising revenue.
That is a fixed pool set by how much viewers pay. YouTube’s pool is a share of the advertising market, so it expands with viewing scale and advertiser demand. Both systems were called monetization, and one of them grew with the market while the other divided a fixed sum.
The surrounding atmosphere differed as well. YouTube’s Japanese television campaign “make a living doing what you love” launched in October 2014, making an already functioning creator economy visible to the general public. Nintendo started its Creators Program in January 2015, giving rights-holder sanction to monetized game commentary on YouTube first.
Around Niconico, commercial success within the community produced friction. In December 2007, the transfer of rights in the Vocaloid hit “Miku Miku ni Shite Ageru” to JASRAC set off a public dispute; ITmedia’s report at the time described widespread concern that free derivative work would become impossible. The anger was aimed at the opacity of the process, but the practical effect for creators was that each step toward earning money required an explanation.
The head of the service later described that climate directly. Kurita wrote on X in February 2024 that anti-commercial sentiment among users had been too strong to work with, citing a 2018 official broadcast poll on introducing a gift function that split roughly six to four in favor, and calling the period around 2018 the watershed for acceptance of creator monetization in Japan. As a recollection from the operator’s side, it moves part of the responsibility onto user culture and should be read with that in mind. A Vocaloid producer replying in the same exchange described feeling both apologetic and grateful when money arrived, which suggests the hesitation was internalized on the creator side too.
Cost also ran in the wrong direction. Extending a Niconico live broadcast required spending 500 points for years, and was made free only in August 2017. YouTube and Twitch let creators broadcast for free and collected later, once an audience existed. Paying to start and getting paid after succeeding are different propositions for someone deciding where to build.
Ranking built a shared experience and narrowed the door in
The third reason concerns how a new viewer finds a video at all.
YouTube had search, related videos, embedding on outside sites and social sharing from an early stage. Videos travelled outward and brought people back.
Niconico organized attention around its rankings. Watching the same video at the same time and reacting to the same jokes came out of that design. The route by which an outsider stumbles in was correspondingly thin.
This was closer to intent than accident. In a November 2007 Nikkei interview, founder Hiroyuki Nishimura explained the design in which comments vanish and only a limited number of recent ones display as a deliberate way to keep the world closed and communication ephemeral, adding that running the same service as everyone else would defeat the point of Niconico existing.
That design strengthens a community and weakens the path in from outside. One idea produced both the distinctiveness and the vulnerability.
Once the three reasons overlap, a loop forms. Creators leave, new uploads thin out, viewers follow, and the thinner audience pushes more creators out. Stopping any one of the three does not stop the movement.
Why danmaku became huge in China while Niconico stayed home
The invention survived. It survived somewhere else.
Niconico did try to go abroad early. Traffic from Taiwan to Japanese anime song videos was reported in 2007, and German and Spanish versions opened in July 2008. In October 2012 the English site was folded into the Japanese site’s English display, and in March 2019 the overseas versions lost their distinct specifications and regional rankings.
No withdrawal was ever announced. There is no closure notice for the country sites, and the only publicly verifiable trace of the retreat is the 2019 consolidation. From October 30, 2024, Niconico restricted overseas access, disabling the smartphone browser version outside Japan and limiting some videos, channels and the Vocacolle app, citing changes in the social environment and international circumstances.
The reason the format travelled badly is built into its strength. A video with comments layered over it requires the viewer to share the language of the video, the language of the comments and the internet context that makes the comments funny. Two walls, not one.
Scrolling comments did become enormous, in China. AcFun inherited the danmaku format from Niconico, and bilibili grew out of that lineage to 366 million monthly users and reported its first full-year profit for 2025. The conditions were different in ways that matter: YouTube has been blocked in China since 2009, and domestic services competed for a huge domestic market with no global incumbent in it. What the comparison establishes is that the comment design itself can support users in the hundreds of millions.
Rights management shows a similar twist. Niconico signed its licensing agreement with JASRAC in April 2008 and YouTube in October of the same year, so Niconico was first by half a year. The divergence came in automated detection. YouTube brought Content ID to Japan in October 2007 with claimed accuracy above 99 percent, while Niconico relied on human monitoring and direct approaches to broadcasters.
Tidying the grey zone also tidied away some of the energy. At a roundtable on derivative works held by ITmedia in July 2008, participants noted that officially sanctioned MAD videos often failed to catch fire. Clearing rights makes the work safe to host and drains part of what made it feel unsanctioned. The trade-off was visible to the people involved at the time.
What “Niconico can still recover” actually means
Every disclosure brings a round of obituaries and a round of rebuttals. The rebuttal splits into two different claims.
The first is that Niconico can compete with YouTube again as a general video platform. Evidence for this is thin. Membership keeps falling and the rate has quickened, and the age distribution disclosed by KADOKAWA in August 2026 puts users in their thirties at 37.0 percent and forties at 22.5 percent, against 1.7 percent in their teens. A platform that new cohorts do not enter shrinks by arithmetic.
The second is that Niconico can grow again as the hub where a specific set of genres posts, watches and gathers. That claim comes with testable evidence.
The Vocaloid Collection, held twice a year, draws between 6,400 and 7,400 new submissions per edition. Paid members of the fan-community service are increasing, and in-person Chokaigi attendance has risen for three straight years.
The physical and online halves of the event diverged early.
| Year | In-person attendance | Online attendance |
|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 92,000 | 3,470,000 |
| 2013 | 104,000 | 5,090,000 |
| 2014 | 125,000 | 7,600,000 |
| 2015 | 151,000 | 7,940,000 |
| 2016 | 153,000 | 5,550,000 |
| 2017 | 155,000 | 5,060,000 |
The figures are from Nlab’s April 2017 compilation. Between 2016 and 2017, while in-person attendance was still setting records, online attendance had already fallen by nearly 30 percent. KADOKAWA’s materials from 2024 onward have disclosed in-person attendance only, and the 138,000 recorded in 2026, though a third consecutive increase, remains below the 2017 level.
Music tells the same story about scale. According to Real Sound’s 2023 analysis, Niconico’s most-played tracks are still dominated by songs from the first half of the 2010s, and the same songs can have more than ten times as many plays on YouTube.
Both readings have a case. One side points to an unbroken decline and to teenagers at 1.7 percent. The other points to roughly 900,000 people still paying 990 yen a month in 2026, when free video is effectively unlimited, and to a segment holding its profit. Both draw from the same earnings deck.
What nobody has published is a breakdown of what the remaining members are paying for. Comment culture, live broadcasting, events and long habit are all plausible, and the company has released no survey that would separate them.
The price increase, after two missed reversal targets
The sharpest criticism supported by primary documents concerns targets the company set for itself.
KADOKAWA stated in its earnings presentations for the years ending March 2023 and March 2024 that it aimed to reverse the declining trend in premium membership. The figures the company has since disclosed run from 1.17 million at the end of March 2024 to 932,000 at the end of March 2026. Two targets, two misses.
Corporate attention sits elsewhere. Oasis Management stated in its press release of May 20, 2026 that it held roughly 13.76 percent of KADOKAWA, having become its largest shareholder in March 2026, and asked shareholders to vote against the reappointment of president Takeshi Natsuno. Of the six reasons it gave, Niconico appears in a single clause noting that it has been losing competitiveness year by year; the substance concerned publishing, games and governance. The reappointment passed at the June 24 general meeting, and according to the Nikkei’s report on the vote it drew 59.68 percent in favor, the lowest among the twelve directors elected. At the August earnings briefing, analysts asked no questions about Niconico at all, concentrating on FromSoftware and the restructuring of the publishing business.
The price increase lands in that context. Premium went from 550 yen to 790 yen in March 2024 and to 990 yen in August 2026, a rise of 80 percent in under three years. The company cites cost increases and has offered point grants and annual-plan incentives to soften the change. Raising unit price while volume falls is still a bet that the price gain outruns the added churn.
The first evidence arrives with the July to September 2026 quarter. If the decline widens there, the increase in revenue per member is cancelled out. Because Apple Account and Google Play subscriptions were left unchanged, what a member pays now depends on how they signed up.
The environment has moved in a way that helps specialists. Video has gone from YouTube dominance to a multipolar field including TikTok and Twitch, and creators now post to several services at once. Being one destination among many, rather than the main one, is a more viable position than it was ten years ago.
Three medium-term markers follow the first one. Whether quarterly decline returns to the 20,000 range. Whether Vocaloid Collection submissions hold above 6,000. Whether the share of users in their teens and twenties moves. Those three together would turn “growth as a hub” from a description into a measurement.
How Did Japanese Users React to Niconico Falling Below 900,000 Subscribers?
The figure sat in an earnings deck for two days before it became a topic. KADOKAWA published the materials on August 13, 2026, specialist outlets wrote it up, and on August 15 Yahoo News Topics carried the headline to a general audience. Almost all of the Japanese-language discussion collected in the quotes and replies to that one post.
What rose to the top of that discussion was defense rather than mourning. The most widely shared opinion posts argued that 900,000 paying subscribers on a home-grown Japanese platform is an achievement, or that subscriber count has stopped being the metric that describes the business. Posts expressing surprise that so many people are still paying outperformed posts lamenting the decline.
The angry reactions had already happened, on a different date. Cancellation announcements clustered around the end of July, just before the August 1 price increase took effect, and they came as small personal posts rather than large ones. By the time the reporting phase arrived in mid-August, criticism was carried mostly by aggregator headlines, and individual critical posts did not gain much traction. These are posts that circulated on X and do not represent Japanese public opinion as a whole.
Niconico’s paid subscriptions fall below 900,000.
Yahoo News Topics posted the headline on August 15, drawing roughly 5,970 likes and 2.85 million impressions. Nearly every post below is a quote or reply to this one.
Honestly, having 900,000 paying subscribers on a home-grown Japanese video site is impressive in itself. If Niconico disappears, YouTube gets free rein to push low-quality ads and raise its Premium fee. I want Niconico to survive, and I want more people to know how good its monetization and tag search are for creators.
This was the most-shared opinion post of the cycle at roughly 4,360 likes, from a VOICEROID commentary creator with 34 followers. The argument is about competition rather than nostalgia: a domestic platform disappearing leaves the incumbent unchallenged on price.
If you actually read KADOKAWA’s earnings materials, Niconico has already shifted toward sustaining the service without depending on paid membership numbers. Arguing about how the platform is run using the premium subscriber count alone feels out of date.
A producer in Niconico’s Vsinger community, who writes earnings breakdowns of the company, drew roughly 2,610 likes for this. It is the same reading of the disclosure that KADOKAWA states in its own segment strategy.
Everyone’s saying the same thing, but wait, there are still more than 800,000 people paying for this?
Roughly 1,510 likes for the reaction that recurred most often in shorter form across the thread. The surprise runs in the opposite direction from the headline, treating the remaining subscriber base as the unexpected part of the news.
Apparently I’d been a premium member for 14 years. It was 525 yen a month when I first joined. This price hike is where I cancel. Thank you, Niconico.
This is from July 30, two days before the price increase took effect, and comes from a game commentary creator signed to the agency UUUM. Farewell posts of this kind ran at roughly 100 to 200 likes each in late July, two weeks ahead of the coverage that pushed the subscriber number into the general feed.
Two Ways to Read 893,000
The number reads two ways. It can mark a service approaching the end of a twenty-year run, or it can mark the persistence of nearly 900,000 monthly payments after a decade of losing a competition. Both readings draw on the same disclosure.
What is settled is the contest over general video scale. On capital for technical investment, on the size of the pool available to creators, and on the routes by which strangers find a video, Niconico has been on the losing side for more than ten years.
What remains is the part with no substitute. Comments crossing the screen, an event on the scale of Chokaigi, and a posting culture that concentrates Vocaloid releases in one place are not currently reproduced elsewhere in the same form. The company’s stated direction has moved accordingly, from recovering membership toward diversifying revenue around those assets.
There is an argument that as generative AI makes video effectively infinite, who you watch with matters more than what you watch. A twenty-year-old design built on viewers sharing a screen in time would then be early rather than obsolete.
Nothing guarantees Niconico inherits that value. Co-viewing and chat exist on YouTube, Twitch and Discord, and distinctiveness alone does not stop a contraction if young users stay away.
The twenty years of Niconico are a record of where Japanese internet culture was born, how it tried to earn a living, and where it stalled. Whether 893,000 turns out to be the last number in that story or a waypoint into the next form will be written into the quarterly disclosures.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many paying members does Niconico have in 2026?
Niconico had 893,000 premium members as of June 30, 2026, down about 101,000 from 994,000 a year earlier, according to KADOKAWA’s first-quarter earnings materials published on August 13, 2026. Separately, the same materials report 109.78 million active accounts including free IDs, which have grown each quarter, and 982,000 paid subscribers to Niconico Channels.
Did the 2024 cyberattack cause Niconico’s membership decline?
No. KADOKAWA stated in its second-quarter materials published in November 2024 that the membership impact of the ransomware attack was smaller than expected and effectively did not occur, while the financial impact reached 3.95 billion yen in lost revenue for the year. The largest quarterly membership drop, 81,000 between December 2024 and March 2025, is attributed in the company’s full-year materials to the suspension of credit card payments, a separate event.
How did Japanese social media react to Niconico’s subscriber decline?
Defense and surprise outweighed mourning. The most-shared post on X, at roughly 4,360 likes, argued that 900,000 paying members on a home-grown Japanese platform is impressive and that losing it would leave YouTube unchallenged on pricing, while the second, at roughly 2,610 likes, argued that subscriber count no longer describes a business KADOKAWA has already shifted away from membership fees. Cancellation announcements did circulate, but they clustered around July 30, 2026, just before the August 1 price increase, rather than around the August 15 coverage of the 893,000 figure.
Is Niconico still profitable?
Yes at the segment level. KADOKAWA’s Web Services segment, of which Niconico-related business is roughly 83 percent, posted revenue growth of 0.3 percent year on year in the April to June 2026 quarter, and was the only one of five segments rated above target in the mid-term plan review published in May 2026, at 133 percent of plan. Higher Chokaigi attendance and sponsor exhibition sales offset the fall in membership fees.
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Reference Links
- Q1 FY2027 earnings presentation๏ฝKADOKAWA (Japanese)
- FY2026 full-year earnings presentation๏ฝKADOKAWA (Japanese)
- FY2024 full-year earnings presentation๏ฝKADOKAWA (Japanese)
- Notice of price revision for Niconico Premium and paid channels, effective August 1, 2026๏ฝNiconico Info (Japanese)
- Niconico Douga suspends service after YouTube blocks its access๏ฝITmedia NEWS (Japanese)
- Niconico broadens the base of amateur music production๏ฝITmedia NEWS (Japanese)
- 1080p HD comes to YouTube๏ฝYouTube Official Blog
- Interview with Hiroyuki Nishimura on Niconico’s design๏ฝNikkei xTECH (Japanese)
