Archive for May, 2008

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.

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.

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.