Motoko’s weblog

Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIAC) has announced its annual report on “State of Internet Search Engine Marketing and Market Size” by Institute for Information and Communications Policy department.

According to the report, Japan’s PPC advertising market (PC websites only) in 2008 grew 20% from 2007 to 1254 billion yen ($1.2 billion). MIAC predicts that the PPC advertising market (PC) in Japan will surpass the radio advertising market in 2010-2011 and will grow to $2 billion market by 2013.

The report also points out following: Continue Reading »

Yahoo Japan announced today that Overture Japan will operate under Yahoo Japan brand starting October 1, 2009. Overture is currently a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan, providing the PPC services for PC and mobile for Japanese search market.

This may be a way to strengthen Yahoo’s online advertising services, which currently provides display ads, text ads, e-mail ads and affiliate programs. By bringing in Overture’s PPC services into Yahoo advertising service plan, they will be able to provide the total online advertising services to its customers. Continue Reading »

Since the announcement of bing-Yahoo deal in US, Softbank president has made a comment that he welcomed the deal, and there was a high possibility for Yahoo Japan to incorporate bing search, too. While the detail is still need to be discussed between the two search giants, his public comment can be viewed as a “GO” sign for the deal in Japan. (Softbank is the biggest share holder of Yahoo Japan.)

Personally, I think bing and Yahoo Japan are even a better match than US counterparts, and here’s why:

Yahoo Japan would keep its popular brand that has been known as a face of search in Japan. This will prevent from losing search users for not being familiar with bing search. Many search users simply search using Yahoo tool bar, and it’ll probably take a while for many (average) search users to notice that it’s powered by bing. Continue Reading »

About 3 weeks ago, the news of Google Japan using paid bloggers to promote their new “hot new keywords” function on the top page took over the search industry around the world. (You can read my initial thought on the topic here.) What’s very interesting to me is that everyone has been spinning it as a “link-spam scheme”, and as a result, Google “punished” Google Japan by down grading the page rank from 9 to 5. (Yeah, that should really hurt Google Japan. lol)

Paid or not, the “word of mouth” campaign using blog has been quite effective in Japan. Many people are aware that some of the bloggers may be paid to write the review, and still welcome the information especially since being compensated doesn’t mean that they’d write something that are not true. Several surveys done in Japan show that people trust and value what they read on blog posts, and often time what they read has an impact on their purchasing decision or action. I assume that Continue Reading »