Motoko’s weblog

Is Yahoo the most popular search engine in Japan? – This is one of the questions that I get all the time. My answer is usually, “Yes, but…”.

The reason for my “but…” is that the engines never disclose the search volumes in Japan. The numbers came out from Japan market in past were all “number of accesses to the site”: “property popularity”and they didn’t represent the search related traffic. This is why Yahoo Japan, a popular portal site, has been mistakengly named as the popular search engine in Japan. Actually, Yahoo is also more popular (by number of PV) than Google in US, but no one point that out.

These engines still don’t officially announce the search volume, but I heard that the difference in search volumes between Yahoo and Google had shrunk to only 2-3%, which means that businesses targeting Japanese market must do well in both Yahoo and Google. Continue Reading »

According to Seedplanning’s 2008 online advertising report, Japan’s Online Advertising Market had a small growth in 2008 from 2007. (See below.) The report shows that about 60% of 458 companies who participated in the survey answered that they used online advertising services in 2008.

Q: Did you use Online Advertising services?

2008: Yes – 64.3%, No – 35.7%

2007: Yes – 63.0%, No – 37.0%

The report also shows that 11% of online advertisers in 2007 did not advertise online in 2008, while 12.3% started to use online advertising services in 2008. Continue Reading »