Launching the Ameba blog and entering the media business (2004)

What it meant to become an owner

The heart of this decision was that it changed the very structure of how the company earned. Ad-agency work is a business of selling other companies’ ad space and one’s own sales muscle, and growth runs roughly in proportion to added headcount. Ameba, by contrast, owns its own media and sells the page views it gathers as ad inventory. Moving to a structure where revenue grows as readers grow, without adding people, meant — in exchange for the resolve to carry years of loss-making up-front investment — gaining a business with leverage. That Susumu Fujita, while the top executive, directly ran a single business was a stone laid to see this shift genuinely through.

The experience of becoming an owner of media defined the company’s later years beyond the success or failure of any one business. The practice of continuing long-term investment while covering losses with the core business’s profits, and the notion of setting a user metric like monthly page views at the centre of management, took shape here at Ameba. The idea of “owning our own media,” born amid the 2000 share-price crash, took the form of a blog here, and would be handed down — an order of magnitude larger — to Cygames in games and AbemaTV in video. As the turning point where an ad-sales company changed its character into an operating company, this choice sits at the knot of the company’s lineage.