Archive for January, 2008

Source comScore: Yahoo! Sites continued to lead the market in Japan with more than 42 million visitors in December. Google Sites captured the second position with 32 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 30 million visitors. The top 25 properties held relatively constant in their positions from November 2007, with small position gains experienced by Sakura Internet, Mixi, Inc., and Seesaa.net.

Chinese search engine Baidu, which has 74% search share in China, has officially open its service in Japan. The Japanese version of Baidu offers web search, image search, video search and blog search services.

Baidu’s CEO Robin Li said, “We are going to add the services and the functions that meet Japanese user’s needs, and would like to make Baidu Asia’s search portal site.  We are hoping that Baidu Japan will become more popular than Yahoo and Google in Japan as we are in China.”

They plan to start offering the paid placement advertising, etc. by 2010.

I’m not sure if or when Baidu will become one of the main search engines in Japan, but this definitely makes the search engine landscape in Japan very interesting in up coming months.

It’s a well known fact that Yahoo Japan has been the most visited site in Japan for years, which is still the case, but we may see Google stealing the position in near future as Google became No. 2 most visited site for the first time in late 2007.

According to Nielsen Japan’s report, Google ranked at #14 back in December 2005. It is a rare case for a site to improve the ranking in such a short period of time. Considering that the ranking is based on the number of access to the site property*, Google’s YouTube purchase must be one of the biggest contributions to increase in popularity. (*Both Yahoo Japan and Google Japan have never disclosed the number of search volume in past.)

While Yahoo Japan is still the most popular site in Japan, they’ve only gained about 8.4 mil accesses/month since December 2005, compared to Google’s 14.6 mil gain during the same period of time.

As Google becoming more popular, the online marketing and advertising cost needs to be monitored closely in 2008, and the budget allocation should be reviewed and updated accordingly.

As you may heard, there are more Internet access from mobile phone than from PC in Japan. According to the latest survey about the mobile search and Internet access done by Japan.internet.com and CrossMarketing, more than 30% of the people took the survey said that they search the words in ads using their mobile phone. The data also shows that more than 95% of people are somewhat satisfied with the mobile search results.

Q1: Have you accessed the sites on the advertisement you saw, using mobile search? (multiple answers)

• Yes, by using QR code - 42%
• Yes, by sending an e-mail to the address on ads - 35%
• Yes, by typing the URL on ads - 33%
• Yes, by searching for the words on ads - 31%

Q2:  When you searched for the words you saw in ads, did you find the information you were looking for?

• Yes, easily - 44%
• Yes, with some efforts - 52%
• No, I didn’t find the site - 4%

Q3. How do you usually access the sites using mobile phone? (multiple answers)

• Bookmark - 69%
• Top menu - 52%
• QR code - 36%
• Word search - 24%
• Type URL - 24%

Now, these numbers are related to the actions triggered by ads, and therefore, the numbers for using QR code and typing in URL are higher, but it still shows that people are using mobile search engines, and the fact that most of them are somewhat happy with the search results is very encouraging to the mobile search market in Japan.