![acfun. acfun.](https://i2.jueshifan.com/7b077d83/78067d80/2a5c36870aacf518ce3f.jpg)
Its ads have been relentlessly parodied by net users since 2009, and many are still popular today. The first involved a brand of fertilizer that claimed to be made in San Diego but was actually sold by a company in Henan. Li, who is also a fan of kichiku videos, recalls two cases in particular that attracted lots of web traffic. Like many others, Li opted to watch NBA games on AcFun rather than on state broadcaster China Central Television: For him, the bullet screen feature made the difference. “AcFun’s best days were probably before 2014,” Li Haoyu, a student from the southern province of Guangdong, told Sixth Tone. Today, both Douyu and Bilibili are valued at over $1 billion. After four years, Chen left AcFun to run its livestreaming arm, Douyu, as a separate company. In 2010, Chen Shaojie, the general manager of a Chinese gaming website, bought AcFun and steered it in a new direction: livestreaming. Together, Chinese netizens affectionately refer to AcFun and Bilibili as “A station” and “B station,” respectively. Xu Yi, a senior employee, left the company to pursue his own video-sharing startup - the predecessor to industry giant Bilibili.
#ACFUN. OFFLINE#
In 2009, AcFun went offline for an entire month because of an internal conflict. Apart from mainstream dramas, AcFun built its reputation on so-called kichiku videos - pop songs remixed by netizens and set to quirky, homemade music videos - and bullet screens, the user comments that fly across videos as they play.īut AcFun’s 11-year history has been turbulent, with ownership changing hands six times and several spinoffs going on to surpass the company in terms of both users and revenue - to the extent that some netizens began referring to the ACG website as a “unicorn incubator.” AcFun filled this niche, and even added subtitles in Mandarin. Short for “anime comic fun,” AcFun was founded in 2007 as a Chinese imitation of the Japanese website Niconico, which attracts hordes of 2-D culture fans interested in animation, comics, and games - jointly referred to as “ACG.” At that time, there wasn’t an outlet providing easy access to Chinese ACG lovers’ favorite Japanese, Korean, and American series. The 25-year-old said poor management, ownership changes, and a clunky interface were likely responsible for the website’s decline. “It was knocked out by the market,” Jiang Mengjie, an AcFun user for over a decade, told Sixth Tone. Though AcFun went offline or had some of its features disabled a handful of times in 2017, netizens soon realized that the company’s February post might really be a final farewell.ĪcFun’s audience has been waning for years, as its rivals proliferate and expand. The company could not be reached for comment. The post was shared nearly 70,000 times, and many netizens begged their beloved video-sharing service not to go away. 2 on microblog platform Weibo, along with a cry-face emoji. “I really want to live for another 500 years,” AcFun wrote Feb. In December, it was rumored that Alibaba intended to acquire AcFun, but a deal has yet to materialize. The once-popular video-streaming website has not paid its employees since October 2017, according to Tencent News, and the lease for its Alibaba-owned servers expired at the end of January. AcFun, China’s first video-sharing platform to feature the now-ubiquitous “bullet screen” function, has been offline since early February.