Motoko’s weblog

It seems that Social Media market is still growing in Japan as both Gree and Mixi posted great Q2 results in October. In this quarter, Gree’s sales went up 94.3% from Q1, and Mixi adjusted their Q4 forecast upward by 3.3%. Since both are doing well, and attracting more advertisers, you may think that you should be at both places to get the most exposures. But, when the average advertising budget shrinking in US, you may not have a luxury of advertising everywhere you want to be. Even if you have, are these and other popular social media sites all good match to your services and the target market? When it comes to mobile sites, the user market seems to have clearer differences than web sites.

(Top: Male, Bottom: Female, Blue: Gree, Red: MobagaTown, Yellow: Mixi - 2009?C?UPDATE inc. MMD Labo. )

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While Japan’s popular Social Networking Services (SNS) still increasing the number of registered users (mixi with 14 million users and Gree with 4 million users), it’s a fact that the “newness” of these services has worn out. Many people are now on these SNS sites less frequently and spending less time.

goo Research and Internet.com’s survey results show that people started to lose interests in SNS sites about 10 months ago. Since mixi opened in February 2004, has the SNS market in Japan peaked out already? If so, what do SNS sites need to do to survive or even to increase active users?

With my experience, it was fun to be invited and to invite friends to join these sites at the beginning. Till then, I was visiting lots of websites owned by my friends to communicate by posting comments on their BBSs. It was getting to be a lot of work, and was definitely time consuming. Continue Reading »