Hatena
👤 Junya Kondo (Ran Japan's top social bookmarking site from Kyoto for a decade; that traffic taught Hatena the ops publishers now buy.)🌐 sitejkondo.hatenablog.com
Hatena ran Japan's biggest blog and bookmark sites for 15 years, then sold that operations skill to publishers.
Will it work? · our read
Vendor, not owner. Profitable every year since 2010 on other people's content. Then one fraudulent wire took ¥1,179M ($7.3M) in 2026 - five times last year's net profit.
01How the money moves
Run Hatena Blog and Bookmark at Japanese web scale
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Sell the same stack to publishers as GigaViewer
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18 publishers pay to run 28 manga services
02The numbers
¥3,794M ($23M)FiledFY2025, TSE-filed accounts
FY ended 31 Jul 2025source:
3,794 million JPY (non-consolidated)
Loss booked as an unusual item in Q3 FY2026; Hatena says recovery efforts with banks continue. Hatena disclosure, 12 Jun 2026
FY2026 guidance cut to ¥3,640M ($22M) with a ¥767M ($4.7M) net loss, driven by the fraud charge.
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 8 October 2026
Hatena GigaViewer page - lists every deployment and states 18 companies, 28 services as of May 2026.Hatena company history - dates each GigaViewer launch from Shonen Jump+ in January 2017, plus the Nintendo companion services.Hatena FY2025 kessan tanshin (TDnet), 12 Sep 2025 - non-consolidated results for the year ended 31 Jul 2025: revenue 3,794,875 thousand JPY (up 14.7%), net income 230,882 thousand JPY.Hatena disclosure, 12 Jun 2026 - books the 1,179M JPY fund-outflow loss, adds 60M JPY of investigation costs, cuts FY2026 guidance to 3,640M JPY, and reprints 3,794M JPY as the FY2025 comparison actual.Hatena disclosure, 17 Jul 2026 - special investigation committee report received; a redacted public version is still pending.
Revenue is FILED: 3,794 million JPY (3,794,875 thousand JPY exactly) is Hatena's non-consolidated FY2025 result (year ended 31 Jul 2025), filed with the Tokyo Stock Exchange via TDnet. I did not stop at a data-aggregator relay: I opened Hatena's own IR library (hatena.co.jp/ir/library.html), traced its e-IR distribution feed to ssl4.eir-parts.net - the host Hatena's own site links to as its disclosure archive - downloaded the actual FY2025 kessan tanshin PDF (12 Sep 2025) as raw bytes, and ran it through pdftotext myself: the string 3,794,875 prints as revenue there, next to 3,309,422 for the prior year, matching the card. That is code reading the filing, not a model summarizing a page. The same 3,794 figure independently reappears in Hatena's 12 Jun 2026 TDnet notice revising FY2026 guidance, which I also downloaded and extracted the same way: it prints 3,794 and 230 as the FY2025 actual comparison and 1,179 as the extraordinary fund-outflow loss, all matching the card. USD figures are my conversion at USD/JPY 162.35 (rate dated 17 Jul 2026); the source publishes only JPY. Period check: this is a full fiscal year, not a quarter, and Hatena reports non-consolidated, so there is no parent-group confusion. What I could not verify firsthand: the Japanese kanji narrative text in these PDFs does not survive pdftotext's font extraction on this filer (only digits and Latin characters do), so the specific description of the incident as fraudulent remittance instructions is Hatena's own public characterization as relayed by secondary coverage, not a sentence I read myself in the filing - flagging that rather than asserting I read it. The 17 Jul 2026 special-investigation-committee notice extracts almost no readable text either; I know its existence, date and title only from the disclosure feed's own metadata, and the card asserts nothing about its findings, which remain genuinely undisclosed. The 18-and-28 counts are Hatena's own figures on its GigaViewer page, dated May 2026, and are already stale: two further deployments were announced in Jul 2026. No pricing is published for GigaViewer, so no per-contract figure appears anywhere on this card. Rival revenue anchors (Media Do, Link-U, Amazia) are TTM figures from stockanalysis.com, a third-party relay - I used that site only for rivals, not for Hatena's own headline number, and did not chase each rival's individual filing. Hatena discloses a single segment, so I could not verify how much of revenue is GigaViewer versus content marketing versus Mackerel - the card does not claim a split. We never score you.