Rakuten has a long list of acquisition casualities, but Viki is bucking the trend

Promotional photo from the Taiwanese drama, “Love Myself or You.”

In the the days following Viki’s reputed US$200 million acquisition by Rakuten, co-founder and CEO Razmig Hovaghimian said his biggest concern was that fans of the service might be angry about the corporate turn the startup took. He had good reason to be worried.

Starting in 2010, Rakuten had spent at least US$475 million in a shopping spree on ecommerce startups in the US, France, and the United Kingdom. Online shopping firms from Brazil and Germany also got picked up for undisclosed sums. Rakuten then downed US$315 million for e-reader Kobo and an indeterminate amount for Spanish video-on-demand service Wuaki. These investments have been marked by unstable leadership – of the seven acquisitions, only two founders (Rakuten Brazil’s Ricardo Ikeda and Wuaki’s Jacinto Roca) are still with their firms. Moreover, all of them have brought in underwhelming revenues.

Though it’s only been a year since the acquisition, Viki appears to be bucking these trends. For one thing, the company is still growing. When Tech in Asia last spoke with Razmig in September 2013, he mentioned that the company had about 22 million monthly active users with 10 million on mobile. Now, there are 35 million monthly active users and 25 million mobile users.

That growth is worldwide. Razmig reports that Latin America and the European Union now make up 40 percent of traffic, whereas they they once only made up 15 to 20 percent. The EU in particular grew 500 percent since last year, with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Poland fueling that growth. In fact, a lodestone of fans have turned up France, now French is the third-most commonly created subtitle language after English and Spanish.

Community building has always been a great strength of Viki’s – unpaid volunteers have created Viki’s 780 million subtitles. Yet the Viki community team does not form on a national level. “It’s content based. You see lots of French translators from different parts of the world,” Razmig notes. He also pointed out that fans of content get excited to be the first to unlock the content to new markets.

Razmig hints that those users can expect to find Viki in some new locations, like Google’s Roku or Rakuten’s Viber, soon. Details are scarce for now but the updates are likely arrive before the end of the year. Razmig was also recently promoted to senior executive officer at Rakuten, and is now an observer (along with Viber’s Talmon Marco) at company board meetings. That position has not been afforded to any other CEOs who previously sold their firms to Rakuten.

Though new products and partnerships might be coming out of Viki in the future, its laser focus on fans will remain consistent.

“We are not a technology company or a community company but we are building a product that matters. For it to matter it needs to have a heartbeat. And that heartbeat is the community,” says Razmig.

See: Razmig Hovaghimian: from failed pizza maker to founder of Viki