Motoko’s weblog

Japan’s advertising giants, Dentsu and Hakuhodo DY Holdings announced the plan to strengthen online advertising in 2010. Dentsu announced the plan to increase Internet-related sales from March 2009 150 billion yen to 250 billion yen by March 2014. Hakuhodo DY also stated that it will double the Internet-related sales from this term’s about 60 billion yen by March 2014. Traditional advertisement mediums continue to underperform, and have no indication to revive any time soon. Continue Reading »

When we talk about Internet users, I don’t think that people in 50s and up are what first comes to our mind, unless of course, that’s what your target market. I thought it was very interesting when I read a report by NetRatings showed that the 50’s and up demographic made 23% of Internet population in Japan, and it had higher growth than the average Internet population growth. For example, number of users in 60+ increased 22% during the past 12 months.

But we rarely see them on Social Networking Sites or blogs. Where do they go and what are they doing on Internet?

NetRatings research shows that “finance” related sites and “news” related sites are very popular among 50+ people in Japan. They also like to visit travel related sites. Continue Reading »

I just came back from a little short of 3 weeks Japan trip. Everywhere I went, it seemed that Internet has become more and more a part of Japanese people’s lives. The search box was still very popular in ads. The QR code seemed to completely took over the bar-code as it was used on food packages, on appliance labels, etc. I even saw it on business cards!

The Internet penetration rate in Japan is very high (70%). However, especially in a country side and for older generations, it can still be a little intimidating. To help these people using Internet, I saw places like City Hall, Legal Affairs Bureau and Tax Agency set up several PCs in the office for people to file paper works online with the assistance of office staffs. Continue Reading »

We all talked about how popular SNS and video sharing became in Japan in 2007. As the rest of the world starting to pay attention to these as new means of marketing, “2007 Web services usage survey” done by Japan.Internet.com hints that Japanese are already looking for the next “thing”.

According to the survey, BBS (bulletin board services), Net auction and surprisingly the Video sharing lost some popularity in 2007 from the previous year. Continue Reading »