Rakuten’s $200 million acquisition of Viki — the video streaming site where users worldwide contribute subtitles to premium content — is a clear sign of how Rakuten wants to use digital content to build out its e-commerce marketplace. Noticeable point being that other suitors for Viki included Google and Yahoo. Rakuten is also a strategic investor in Pinterest. While Viki “works very closely” with Yahoo in Asia and is one of YouTube’s approved multichannel networks, it still decided to go with Rakuten claiming it to be a better fit “at a culture and chemistry level.”
Viki is still a big step behind YouTube in terms of traffic — in July, it had marked 400 million words translated by its users over 163 languages, covering content from 100 partnerships with premium content brands and millions of views on its most popular programs. But advertising is very promising already, with CPMs on ads run alongside its videos “like Hulu in some regions,” with some campaigns coming in “north of $50 on CPMs” and some inventory selling out.
The longer term plan for Viki is not just video display. Viki has a clear complement to what Rakuten is already trying to do with video — it owns a Netflix-style OTT video streaming company in Europe called Wuaki, and there are plans to put more of that kind of Rakuten content on to devices made by Kobo, the e-reader and tablet company owned by Rakuten.
Rakuten is expanding in many countries and their vision is to provide e-commece market place all over the world. The translation part might just become the missing piece in the puzzle.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/02/video-site-viki-had-offers-from-google-and-yahoo-before-it-took-a-200m-deal-with-rakuten-which-plans-to-use-the-translation-platform-in-e-commerce/
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