social 
Takeshi Hirano
Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too.
Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group.
Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now.
Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers.
In addition to Qiita Team, the company has also launched a job/talent matching site called ‘Qiita Carrer’. But how does the company intend to monetize all these services? Konishi explains:
Qitta Career is a gateway for our partner recruiting companies which might be a suitable fit for our users as they advance their careers. We’re currently exploring other business models too by adding some features.
If Qiita can reach half of the country’s programmers, the startup likely has a promising future.
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Although Github itself is certainly a favorite here too. ↩
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The figure comes from a white paper on IT human resources in Japan by Japan’s IT Promotion Agency. ↩
Yukari Mitsuhashi
