"nico" comes from nico nico douga.
"mas" comes from a xbox360 game (was originally arcade game) called " IDOLM@STER"
IDOLM@STER enables you to become a in-game producer and produce an idol singer.
There are a lot of Nico Nico douga users that loves idol m@ster, and they create lots of idol master MADs. These are called Nico-mas. There are 40,379 nico nico douga videos with idol master tags. There are MANY Nico mas communities within nico nico douga community, and I could find a list of more than 150 nico mas communities here... and there must be more I think.
I think many boys- not just Japanese- loved to watch girls' idol singers when they were young. If you play with IM@S, you can be the producer of various virtual idol girls and lead them to become a star!
They have made verious type of girls- cute ones, older but beautiful ones, a girl with glasses, twins, etc. They have also made various songs that became popular among the nico chus.
Some of the idol master songs look like this:
In this video, you can see lots of comment arts that users created on top of the video:
This is one of the cool iM@S MAD animes, THE iM@TRIX RELOADED OP
Another MAD here, THE iDOL M@STER - ACM Will Rock You！
In general, Nico Nico users do not reveal their real names nor their faces. Nico mas producers name themselves as producer names in the game anyways, so often those names becomes their Nico video handle names. (For example, if my in-game producer name was "Fumi", people would call me "Fumi-P", P stands for Producer)
Last month, 108 Nico mas producers gathered to make a 24 hour Nico Nico TV program, each creating 5-20 min MAD anime clips. It's not really a "TV" program, but they made 24 hours worth of videos and played them in Nico Nico Douga- which is amazing!
Here you can see the opening video;
This is the list of all the 24hour videos
This is the time table (goes on for 24 hours)
wiki for the 24 hour event
live BBS during the 24 hour event
They had a voting contest during the 24 hour event :
The whole site is dedicated to introducing good nico-mas videos.
BTW, this Master Artists series has the total of 6,000,000,000 yen(60,000,000USD)
including all the games and related products, which is like... gosh!!!
- Data source: ASCII
this is pretty amazing too!
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