Revenues come from ads within user-submitted videos with Kadokawa content

Kadokawa Group Holdings revealed that it is receiving over 10 million yen (about US$110,000) a month from Google's YouTube video-sharing service by the end of last year. Advertisements on user-submitted videos based on The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (pictured below), Lucky Star, Strike Witches, and other anime accounted for most of that total. Kadokawa Group Holdings is the corporate parent of the publishers Kadokawa Shoten, ASCII MediaWorks, Enterbrain, and Kadokawa Group Publishing, and it also owns the media companies Kadokawa Production and Kadokawa Pictures.

Kadokawa opened its own Japanese channel on YouTube in the beginning of 2008 and added its first full episodes of Full Metal Panic! and Mushi-Uta last February. However, most of its revenues from YouTube come not from episodes that Kadokawa itself added, but from ads on MAD videos — the Japanese term for user-generated content that incorporates pre-existing audio, images, video, or animation. Kadokawa and YouTube launched a program that places ads around approved videos with Kadokawa's copyrighted materials in June. Kadokawa explained its new strategy to Nikkei Business Publications' Tech-On! website in March and to BusinessWeek magazine in August.

In the three months between September and November of 2008, those videos were seen over 50 million times. Kadokawa implemented the inVideoAd system in October that places ads directly in the videos. Since inVideoAd's introduction, Kadokawa's short-term revenue from YouTube has jumped dramatically. In August, Kadokawa announced that it will be placing the animated versions of Puyo's The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya-chan (Suzumiya Haruhi-chan no Yūutsu) four-panel gag manga and Eretto's Nyorōn Churuya-san parody manga on YouTube.

Source: animeanime.jp

Image © 2006 Nagaru Tanigawa / Noizi Ito / member of SOS

Update: Year of 50-million-view statistic fixed. Thanks, jel123.