Kadokawa To Allow YouTube Uploads

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Variety: Kadokawa looks into YouTube toons
Media conglom Kadokawa Group Holdings is tying up with YouTube to earn ad coin from its toons that have been posted without its permission. Starting in June, when Kadokawa finds its toons on YouTube, it will check to see if the person/company that posted the content is legit rather than immediately ordering YouTube to take it down. If the person/company is OK'ed, Kadokawa will run ads on the poster's Web page and divide the revenue with YouTube and the poster. This business model is a first for the Japanese biz. Until now, Japanese visual contents rights holders, including TV nets and pic producers, have policed YouTube and similar sites for illegal use of their content and notified the site owners when they spot what they consider a pirate. Kadokawa, however, wants to encourage legit uses of its toons, while spreading the international word about them on YouTube and reaping profits in the bargain. Last year Kadokawa group company Kadokawa Digix participated in a test of the Google video identification and ad linkage software. Seeing their effectiveness, Kadokawa launched a vid clip page in February in collaboration with YouTube. The new toon venture carries that partnership one step farther.

[Mulboyne]

BusinessWeek: Japanese Anime Studio Embraces YouTube Pirates

Last May, when Kadokawa Holdings released The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on DVD in the U.S., fans of Japanese animation swarmed shops in Los Angeles and other cities. For months, Kadokawa, a Tokyo publisher and TV and movie distributor, had dropped hints about the anime's imminent overseas release on a Web site. But other than that, it did almost no advertising. It didn't have to. The company merely tapped into the huge following Haruhi Suzumiya already had on YouTube and other video-sharing Web sites. It sounds like the classic viral-marketing success story. But Kadokawa arrived at this strategy more by luck than by design. And lawyers would have been appalled by what they saw: the company allowing rampant Internet piracy to go unchecked. That's not how Kadokawa sees it, though. Chairman and CEO Tsuguhiko Kadokawa thinks his company has nothing to lose by reaching out to anime diehards. As he sees it, the company's traditional publishing business has no future in the digital era. And suing YouTube for copyright infringement, as MTV Networks owner Viacom did last year, would have only angered anime fans who have been using the site.

No Guarantee Goodwill Will Pay Off
With the experiment, Kadokawa is betting it can score points with the anime faithful and win over new fans overseas where it might sell DVDs, downloads, and other paraphernalia. But there's no guarantee the goodwill will pay off. "I think a lot of people are watching to see whether we will succeed," Kadokawa said in an interview last week at the Creative Commons conference in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo. "If we can do something they haven't been able to do up to this point, they may follow suit."

On a recent afternoon, at an office upstairs from a men's clothing shop near the Korakuen amusement park in Tokyo, Kadokawa employees were busy watching several hundred freshly uploaded YouTube videos. They have been at it since January, when Kadokawa announced it would use YouTube's video-identification technology to scan the video-sharing site. In the past few months, they have found tens of thousands of online videos made with its content, mostly culled material from Kadokawa's two hottest shows, Haruhi Suzumiya and Lucky Star. (Haruhi Suzumiya is about a bored high school girl who creates an imaginary world to cope, while Lucky Star is about four high school girls who only care about manga and video games.)

Employees keep track of what they see on a spreadsheet and immediately issue takedown notices for videos that have been copied from DVDs. "We are checking every video, one by one," says Tadashi Fukuda, president of Kadokawa's digital media division Kadokawa Digix. The employees will use the database to create a program that will learn which videos should stay and which should get taken down.

Seal of Approval for Some Videos
That's only part of the plan. Kadokawa wants to endorse the best YouTube videos made with its content, some of which have been watched more than a million times. It's sending e-mails to YouTube users, asking for permission to place Kadokawa's marque and an ad alongside their videos, and encouraging them to join the four-month-old Kadokawa Anime channel on YouTube (2,186 have joined). Which videos make the cut? "If we can feel the love from the fans, I would say it's O.K. to leave it," says Fukuda. He is even looking into sharing the channel's ad revenues with users.

It's unclear whether Kadokawa's experiment will ever make the company any money. And it's not cheap, either: Kadokawa expects to spend $1 million on the project over the next few months.