Softbank is the winner - iPhone contract in Japan

It was between Softbank and DoCoMo. DoCoMo commented that they were “disappointed” about the results, following the announcement by iPhone regarding the Japanese market contract with Softbank. This means that iPhone will have Yahoo search as it’s official search engine. Yahoo’s search team already developed iPhone/iPod Touch search services, which has functions to switch between iPhone/iPod Touch screen and PC screen. The functions on iPhone/iPod Touch screen have been adjusted to provide better usability and the search experiences. It also has image search function.

Yahoo Japan’s AdPartner to begin Contents-Match

Yahoo Japan announced that they begun providing the contents match advertising as a part of their AdPartner services. With this service, the website owners who have Yahoo Japan ID can begin earning money from advertising displayed on their websites.

The earnings can be paid in cash or can be converted to Yahoo Points. While cash payment (wire transfer) would cost the transaction fee to the site owner, Yahoo points can be very attractive to Japanese owners as it can be used at Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Auctions, and other popular e-commerce sites.

65% of Japanese use Internet to book travels

Japan has survived another “Golden Week” earlier this month. “Golden Week” is one of the biggest leisure travel weeks in Japan usually starts at the end of the April and lasts for about a week.

According to Overture Japan’s survey against 1000 people in 20s, 30s and 40s, 65% of them went “online” to research and to book the trip, followed by “travel magazines (17.4%) and “travel agencies (17%).  Even the ones who did book the trip at the agencies, many of them first researched the information online.

Of course, Internet doesn’t mean just the search engines. Many travel portal sites and the booking sites such as Yahoo Travel, Rakuten Travel and Arukikata play a big part in people’s research process. If you are a travel related site owner, you should check your site’s visibility in the search results at these portal sites as well as Yahoo Japan and Google Japan.

Mobile coupon boosts portal site membership

One of Japan’s popular mobile portal sites “Club Donpen (http://www.donpen.com/)” reported that their membership reached 1 million in April. They commented that the mobile coupon services started last September helped increasing the membership. With the coupon service, the members can receive additional discounts at participating stores in Japan.

More and more shops and restaurants are participating in mobile coupon services such as above. Often times, it allows the user to use coupons without printing it out, which is very convenient.

Japanese mobile video sharing sites data

DoCoMo.com has conducted mobile video sharing site survey against their mobile users (1400+) in Japan. The results show that 67% of them knew about video sharing sites for mobile, and 20% have used these mobile sites. The popular sites are YouTube and NicoNicoDouga.

On the other hand, Web Marketing Guide’s research with Net Asia Research shows 58% has used mobile video sharing sites. Again, MyTube mobile and NicoNicoDouga mobile are the two popular sites, and 70% of them watch music videos.

In Japan’s web version of video sharing market, currently YouTube is the most popular site followed by NicoNico Douga and Google Video. The service is most popular among teenagers in Japan.

Japan’s Mobile ads market grew to 81.5 bil yen in 2007

Seed Planning’s report shows that Japan’s mobile advertising market (including mobile affiliate ads) grew to 81.5 billion yen in 2007. The mobile affiliate advertising market grew 184.5% to 17.9 billion yen from the previous year.

They predicts that the mobile advertising will grow to 100 billion yen market in 2008 with further improvements on the mobile devices and with the services such as video sharing, which help increase the mobile e-commerce users.

According to Softbank and Humancapital’s research, more than 73% of survey participants purchase products/services online (PC) more than once a month, and spend about $120/month.  The most popular items were “Books and Magazines” followed by “CDs and DVDs”. Unlike Western markets, music and video sharing sites don’t have negative effects on the music/movie sales in Japan even though Japanese are one of the heavy users of these sharing sites.

Rakuten and Fast opened the original Mobile Search

Rakuten, one of Japan’s popular e-commerce sites and current top 3 property in Japan, and Norway’s Fast Search and Transfer announced their mobile search engine site, “Rakuten-Fast Mobile Search”. (http://m.rfms.jp)

This mobile search site use their original mobile search engine “RF Search”, which analyze the meaning of the search term (keyword), and find the pages that are most relevant to the keyword from their data base of more than 200 million page index.

It is exciting to see that Japanese companies coming up with their own search engines while many people just focus on Yahoo and Google. Japanese language is very different from Western languages, and mobile market in Japan is different from any other markets in the world. It just make sense to have Japan’s original engines. Having another engine with different algorithm (different search results) would benefit the users.

2007 Japanese advertising market

According to Dentsu’s 2007 Japanese advertising cost report, more money was spent on the Internet advertising (600 bil yen) than magazine ads (459 bil yen) for the first time in history.

The report shows that a total of 7019 bil yen was spent for advertising in 2007 in Japan, compared to 6940 bil yen in 2006. The ads spending for TV (1998 bil yen), magazine, newspapers (946 bil yen) and radio (167 bil yen) have been declined for the past 3 years. On the other hand, the ads spending for Internet has been growing rapidly for the past 4 years in Japan.

I think that the continue growth of Internet advertising market in Japan shows that the advertisers see more values in Internet advertising than other medias. Still, the total amount spent for Internet ads is less than 30% of what was spent for TV ads. I think that advertisers will shift more budget for Internet where they can measure the effectiveness of the ads. Also, I saw more TV ads that were made to point people to their website in 2007. In order to achieve the best results, it’s time to think about both off-line and on-line ads as one campaign, instead of treating them individually.

Japan’s Softbank said “Asia and mobile are the keys”

One of Japan’s giant corporations, Softbank’s president, Mr. Son said, “The one who conquers Asia and mobile markets would conquer the Internet market in the world.” Softbank owns Yahoo Japan, Softbank mobile (Vodaphone), and MySpace Japan (tie-up) among many other organizations in Japan. Recently, they’ve been aggressively going after other Asian markets.

He also said, “Mobile phone is now an Internet device. I believe that Google will become one of our major competitors within 5 to 10 years.” Google has won the tie-up contract with “au” and NTT’s “DoCoMo”, and has became one of the major players in Japan’s mobile industry in last year.

He added that Yahoo would work with China’s Baidu and S. Korea’s Naver to keep Google from becoming a market leader in Asia.

Website has big impact on Japanese shoppers

Netratings Japan’s survey against online shoppers in Japan shows that Website has the biggest impact on shoppers by far* throughout the purchasing process. It also shows that of those who visited websites during the purchasing process, the ones who took some type of actions on the site (registering for newsletters, signing up for prize, etc.) have more interests in products and/or services offered at the site, and more likely to purchase the products/services offered.

*Sample research results: Purchasing process for credit card service

1. The first exposure to the products/services

- Website (41%), TV (20%), Store (13%), Printed ads (7%), Friends/family (6%)

2. Comparing the services/products

- Website (69%), Store (6%), Friends/family (5%), Printed ads (3%)

3. Purchasing decision

- Website (59%), Store (14%), Friends/family (7%), Printed ads (5%)

I think this survey results show that even when people make the final purchasing action off-line, the information they gathered on websites has the biggest impact to the decision making process.