Type of site Entertainment news Owner Natasha, Inc. Website natalie.mu | Available in Japanese Slogan(s) Pop culture news site Alexa rank 6,873 | |
Natalie (ナタリー, Natarī) is a Japanese entertainment news website, that debuted on February 1, 2007. It is operated by Natasha, Inc. The website is named after the song of the same name by Julio Iglesias. Natalie has been providing news for such leading Japanese portals and social networks as Mobage Town, GREE, Livedoor, Excite, Mixi, and Yahoo! Japan. It has also been successful on Twitter, with 300,000 followers as of December 2010 being the third most followed Japanese media company, after Mainichi Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.
Contents
History
Natasha, Inc., a content provider, was founded in December 2005, becoming a limited company in February 2006 and being demutualized in January 2007.
On February 1, 2007, Natasha, Inc. opened its own news website Natalie, named after the song "Nathalie" by Julio Iglesias. It was dedicated exclusively to music news and created with the idea of updating on a daily basis, something that newspapers could not do. The website also offered optional registration, that would allow commenting on news articles and creating a list of up to 30 artists to receive updates about.
Natalie grew fast, opening a manga news subsite named Comic Natalie on December 25, 2008, the comedians news subsite Owarai Natalie on August 5, 2009, and the snack news subsite Oyatsu Natalie on May 18, 2011, although the latter proved to be short-lived and closed on August 31 of the same year.
Management
The founder and representative director of Natasha, Inc. is Takuya Oyama. He is also the editor-in-chief of the music news website. As of 2011, the editor-in-chief of Comic Natalie was Gen Karaki, also a bass player for such artists as Speed, Ram Rider, Haruko Momoi, and Nana Katase.
Since 2014, Natasha is a subsidiary of KDDI.
Critical response
According to the news media outlet IT Media News, while the Natalie music website has lots of information that a hardcore fan is anxious for, the material is overly detailed and the readers only take glimpses at the article content.