pixiv

pixiv is a Japanese online community for artists and its headquarters are located at Sendagaya, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan.

History

Founded on Monday, July 25, 2005 (Heisei 17); pixiv started with the idea of the programmer Takahiro Kamitani, who is himself an artist known as Bakotsu on the website. He launched pixiv on Monday, September 10, 2007 (Heisei 19) as a beta test. Nineteen days later, it had exceeded 10,000 users in registration after launch, which gave Kamitani some problems in maintaining pixiv on his own. This led him to allow Crooc Inc. to manage pixiv instead of him managing it entirely alone on October 1, 2007. Soon the website underwent a renewal on December 18, 2007 into what it basically is today. Crooc was renamed into pixiv Inc. on November 1, 2008.

Currently the CEO of Pixiv Inc. is Yasuhiro Niwa.

Language Availability

As of today, pixiv is available in 5 different languages : Japanese, English, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Korean, and Russian. Due to the increasing traffic coming from users outside Japan, especially from Taiwan and China, it has lead pixiv to implement a Chinese version of the website. Soon an increasing traffic from United States, Korea, and Russia also led pixiv to implement an English version (Feburary 28, 2011), Korean version and Russian version of the website (both May 30th, 2011).

pixiv also launched its English version Twitter account on May 11, 2011, mainly for English support and to announce any pixiv related news and contests in English.

pixiv or Pixiv?

pixiv ロゴby山猫通信

This is a common question for most people who uses pixiv. According to the logo, pixiv is formed with a small letter p instead of a capital letter P. For casuals who are not too familar with the website will usually write pixiv with a capital P instead.

The name for the website is officially written as pixiv, with a lowercase or minuscule p.

pixiv of Today

As of January 2010, the website is visited approximately 34 million times daily, and about 1.5 billion times monthly as of May 2010. As of May 2010, the site consists of over 2 million members, over 11 million submissions, and receives over 20,000 submissions daily. pixiv aims to provide a place for artists to exhibit their illustrations and get feedback via a rating system and user comments.

The implementation of manga viewer on pixiv at September 18, 2009 allowed users to submit their own manga, while the implementation of pixpedia (pixiv Encyclopedia) on November 1, 2009 (English version somewhere around the end of April 2011) has enabled users to submit various articles about common subjects of pixiv work and memes. It also serves as an index and dictionary for the over 1.6 million tags used on pixiv.