China's 1st overlay-comment video site closes

World
Europe

AcFun, China's first video-sharing website that shows comments directly on the visual images, was officially shut down on Friday.

The website, widely called "the A site" among Chinese anime and video gaming fans, obliquely announced the closure on its official Weibo microblog, drawing more than 100,000 RIP "rest in peace" messages on the Internet.

It had about 690,000 daily users in December 2017, according to data from iResearch.

But the site was doomed largely by a lack of funding, Chinese tech media speculated.

Web Picture‍

Comment on the video, literally

AcFun was special to many users because it provided a service that overlaid user comments on the video picture, instead of the comment section below.

The comments would appear at the same video timestamp as when the commenters wrote them.

When a video reaches climax, many comments will "shoot out" from the right edge to the left, resulting in a "bullet hell" effect, which is called "Danmu" in China.

This commenting fashion was imported from Japan, where it's called "Danmaku." The most famous Danmaku website in the world is Niconico (nicovideo.jp), which is the eighth most visited site in Japan.

AcFun created a similar service in the Chinese mainland in June 2007 and soon became home to a large following of Chinese anime lovers.

Homepage of acfun.cn, caught by Google cache service /Screenshot from Google

Some AcFun users, mostly between the ages of 19 to 24, like to re-edit the animes for fun or express their personal views.

"All anime lovers are one family," said the front page title of the website. "You lose if you get serious."

Outperformed by a latecomer

AcFun lost the competition with a similar service, Bilibili, before going down.

LOGO of Bilibili /Web Picture

Widely called "the B site," Bilibili has now grown to be the second most visited video website in China, ranked by web traffic data analyzer Alexa.

Bilibili generated large revenues by operating mobile games, including the Chinese version of Fate/Grand Order, one of the most downloaded mobile games in China and Japan.

A lot of AcFun viewers watch Bilibili as well.

"AcFun failed to develop a working mobile service before it's too late," said "Sange", a video sharer on AcFun. "It's always one step behind the B site on technology."

Some other sharers blamed the death of AcFun on poor management.

Diminishing hope

AcFun's shutdown was rumored for months. Now the rumor debate is about whether the website can get enough funding to revive itself.

Images appearing to be chat records from AcFun insiders suggested that Jack Ma's Alibaba is trying to invest in the site.

The exposed chat record /Web Picture

"Alibaba wants to use AcFun to fight with Tencent, as the latter owns a large portion of Bilibili," said the record. "But the original investors of website, especially anime and toy company Alpha Animation, would prefer to kill the site forever if Jack Ma didn't offer enough money."

We at CGTN could not access AcFun's web or mobile service up to the time this piece was published. We will keep monitoring the website for further developments of the story.