According to the first quarter financial report of Kakugawa Group for March 2026, its main video platform NicoNico's overall revenue continued to decline.The company attributes the main reason to the recent reduction in paid members - the platform's credit card payment function was shut down for several months.

Although the number of members rebounded slightly this quarter (paid members increased by 5,000 to 994,000), there is still a huge gap compared with historical data.After excluding the special losses caused by the cyber attack in June 2024 on NicoNico, the company admitted that paid members had fallen below the million mark for two consecutive quarters, resulting in a shrinking overall revenue.

Although the number of members has continued to slow down in recent years (2.5 million people were peaked from 2016 to 2017), Kadokawa emphasized that the recent sharp drop is due to restrictions on international credit card payments.From May 2024 to February 2025, the platform only supports JCB credit card payment, and the company believes that this move has caused user churn.

Niconico has now revised the Terms of Use and Code of Conduct to completely ban adult content and restore Visa credit card payment channels.However, the losses caused to potential paid users by the payment restriction period of up to 9 months may have irreversible harm to the platform.