San Francisco—based manga publisher Viz LLC has announced a marketing agreement between its Shonen Jump magazine and America Online's Red service, a customized teen site, to run Flash animations of 13 episodes of the popular Dragon Ball manga series on the AOL service. The Dragon Ball series will be offered exclusively on AOL Red for 48 hours, before being offered through the Shonen Jump Web site.
AOL Red has about 11 million registered teen users and reports about 100,000 unique visitors every day and more than three million users each month. The agreement is part Viz's efforts to promote popular content from Shonen Jump, a monthly Viz anthology with a circulation of 175,000. Shonen Jump offers serialized content that is also released as complete manga graphic novels.
Yumi Hoashi, v-p of Shonen Jump, told PW that AOL Red is a perfect marketing venue: "We want more exposure for Dragon Ball and Shonen Jump, and AOL Red has the content and services that attract the teens we want. Manga translates worldwide. We've found that if kids in Japan like a title, kids over here seem to like it, too. "
