AcFun is video-sharing site company based in Beijing China. Classified as media and entertainment hub; AcFun is one of the key providers of entertainment with topics on drama, music, dance, game, sports and other forms of entertainment. It also posts contents and videos in other social media like YouTube. However, it has not managed to break into the mainstream like twitter and Facebook.
Today AcFun site disseminates large content to its consumers ranging from animation, entertainment, games and other contents that its enthusiast consumers await with loyal subscriptions.
The company was founded in 2007; and became one of the earliest video sites. Initially it was based on Sina video, and a year later they re-launched with a Niconico-style player a technology that has incredibly allow it to grow immensely in the competitive video-site arena. AcFun allows its viewers to write text comments on the actual video – called bullet-screen.
Partners
AcFun does not produce its own video contents. It depends on other video-sharing companies for some of its content. Companies like Youku, QQ Video, Sina Video, among other are AcFun key working partners.
Investors
Softbank China Venture is its primary investor and its total funding is $110 Million.
According to Chinese media report, AcFun also received an investment of $50 million strategic investment on August 6th, 2015 from one of its investors; Youku Tudou Inc. This is confirmed by Jing, M. China Daily who states, ”The funding from SB China capital is only a month after AcFun raised $50 …”
The culture AcFun inculcates and reason for its popularity
AcFun is increasingly becoming popular among the younger generation. It is believed that the culture originated from Japan and is quickly spreading in China especially among the millennials because they are able to interact with viewers as they watch the streaming online.
AcFun improved its services and in 2010 it receives an award from Guangzhou-based new weekly magazine for being the ‘Specialty Website of 2010’.
Currently, AcFun is only available in China where it faces stiff completion from BiliBili; another bullet-screen provider. It is anticipated that suppose SBCVC invests in AcFun; the completion between AcFun and BiliBili will be increase too thus expansion of the market and content improvement will be recorded.
Interestingly, AcFun changed its domain form .cn to .tv in 2011 to try to stave off competition. This move that made it brush-shoulders with the regulator body and was punished for a lack of license. In 2014 they went back to their original domain after it was blacklisted.
AcFun video-sharing Company’s position
According to Smooth Stat Free website statistics (2014-16), AcFun Company has recorded a healthy revenue statistics over the years. In Alexa Rank; AcFun is ranked 600th in the world. This is a considerably a good performance record considering the great numbers of same service providers in the world.The company is valued $30 Billion USD.
Amidst the successes it has made in the highly competitive market, AcFun is still faced with other issues like the slow servers network or trouble shooting is sometimes the total shut-down of servers. However it is important to note that such a problem is not only experienced by AcFun alone but also other many other companies in China.
How it has managed to stay as the most competitive video-share site?
AcFun has remained a top-performing site by being on the imageboard website format which is an internet forum that depends majorly in image sharing. This kind of technology is similar to the bulletin board systems which are used for discussing various topics. The only advancement that differentiates the two is that whereas bulletin board is a text based, imageboard forum operates on image sharing only.
The adoption of image board by the AcFun is seen as an improvement since this kind of forum is more transitory with the contents it shares with topics varying from videos to news.
In addition, adoption of imageboard has expanded AcFun’s market since the forum makes it different from other online galleries since most of imageboard works are not posted from poster but rather taken from other online sources, other imageboards, galleries and edited pictures.
For those seeking anonymity, AcFun through its use of imageboard allows them to post and comment without the need to register.
AcFun video-sharing also uses Futaba channel that allows posted contents be ranked according to the hierarchy of topical interest. This means that those posts that attract more interest will always be at the top.
This kind of technological development and adoption of the highly recommended technic is a perfect scheme to avoid the setbacks like the blacklisting that AcFun experienced at certain time before. The imageboard and the Futaba channel are the requirements that the laws of China placed so as to avoid the infiltration of pornographic contents into the online markets.
Future plans
AcFun together with its management team vowed to maintain and attract more visitors into their site. However they believe that this cannot be achieved just by depending on secondary contents from their partners but rather by developing their own original contents and related secondary content from the newly adopted Futaba channel.