Rakuten’s Asian Media Streamer Viki Sees Registered Users Increase to 53 Million

Go to Viki and you’ll find a plethora of TV shows in languages such as Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Thai. But before assuming you’ve crawled through an internet portal to a cross-continental television experience, stick around for the ads. You’ll find blue-chip American brands like Lexus and McDonald's advertising their wares in English. That’s because San Mateo, Calif.-based Viki’s audience is global. Half come from the Americas, with other primary markets in the European Union, Southeast Asian and India, according to a spokesperson for Rakuten Viki, a division of the Tokyo-based internet giant that acquired Viki in 2013. And it’s growing. Viki counted 53 million registered users as of December 2021, a 43% increase from the year prior, the spokesperson said. Anyone can watch Viki, but registering lets users save their place in a show and unlock personalized recommendations. This growth is powering new content on the platform, with Viki doubling its investment in Korean, Chinese and Japanese verticals in 2022. A $4.99 monthly subscription turns off ads, and a $9.99 plus layer offers access to more premium content. Between February 2020 and February 2021, Viki saw an 80% growth in subscribers, though the company declined to give subscription growth for 2021. This growth is in part explained by the soaring popularity globally of Korean culture, and the company said it has one of the largest libraries of Korean content in the U.S. (Korean boy band BTS was the world’s third most streamed artist on Spotify in 2021, and in February 2021, Netflix said it was investing $500 million in Korean content, which paid off in smash hit Squid Game.) YouTube CTV Ads Leaderboard Highlights Top Connected TV Ads of 2021 And connected TV viewership, in general, is growing, particularly ad-based video on demand (AVOD), which is picking up viewers faster than the more mature subscription market (Viki offers both). In the U.S., 38% of the population watched AVOD in 2021, which is expected to grow to nearly half by 2025, according to Insider Intelligence. And the dollars are following the eyeballs, albeit at a slower pace: Ad spend is projected to rise to $19 billion in 2022, a 32% increase from last year, Insider Intelligence found. Viki certainly doesn’t have the biggest reach compared to competitors like Hulu or Paramount+. But it thinks it can sell advertisers on its engaged audience and unique contextual environment at a time when advertisers are prioritizing niche over reach and looking for new ways to acquire customers without third-party tracking. “This younger, hyper-engaged audience is a main contributor as to why brands choose to partner with Viki,” said Amber Lockwood, vp of media sales for North America at Rakuten Advertising. Defining the audience Viki fosters this engagement through its unique crowd-sourced translating: Users contribute subtitle translations Wikipedia-style and are rewarded with access to special features. Viki experienced a 22% year-over-year growth in translators globally. Another unique feature is Watch Party, where communities watch shows together. Unlike the Netflix feature, which is a browser plugin to watch shows with people you know, Viki orchestrates the event so fans who don’t know each other can react together, with an option for creating your own party. Advertisers are willing to trade reach for engagement when evaluating their media mix, said Ashley Gordon, group media director at creative agency Dagger. “You could say to a bigger streamer, ‘How do we home into those people that may not have the kind of engagement a more specialized service would have?’” Gordon said. “We’re going to look more at engagement so [consumers] actually respond to our ads.” Active and younger skewing Viki's active viewers watch 19 days of content a month, and the average viewer spends more than two hours a day on the platform, according to a Viki spokesperson. This is more time than the typical viewer of huge streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, though not as much as Hulu and YouTube, which have average viewing minutes of 130 viewing minutes and 128 viewing minutes, respectively, according to Nielsen estimates. A unique facet of Viki’s audience is it skews younger than other platforms. The company said 64% of its users were women between the ages of 18 and 24. But Viki is just one of many options to target younger people, and each requires a bit of a learning curve for advertisers. “[For] any new platform, if there is enough reach or composition of your target audience, then you take those steps and you stumble around and figure that out,” Gordon said. “Is it worth it based on whatever your campaign objectives are?”