Reviewing the seasonal visitor growth with Japanese cooking sites

A report by Nielsen/Net Ratings on the site view changes in February shows most of the popular cooking (recipes) sites had a large increase in site views. 3 of them had more than 30% increase in site view from January, and most of the increase came from female between 20-50.

Why? It’s the Valentine’s Day.
Unfortunately (for women, and fortunately for men), Valentine’s Day is a day for women to give gifts (usually chocolate… it’s not about love, it’s about how we can make chocolate companies richer…) to men in Japan. The original idea was for a woman to give a chocolate to someone who she loves, but now it’s more like a Halloween (without costume, I hope) that every woman and girl gives chocolate to every man in sight (family, friends, colleague, bosses, teachers, etc.)
The 3 sites, which had a huge increase in female visitor in February all had Valentine’s Day special chocolate and other cooking pages. Also, they all had inbound links from popular web portals Valentine’s Day pages such as Yahoo!’s “Valentine’s Day Special”.

So, popular portals with Valentine’s Day special articles directed traffic to cooking sites with recipes for Valentine’s Day cooking. I’d love to put an ad on the recipe pages, if I were the company selling tools and ingredients used in recipes.

Now, Japanese women are not so unfortunate after all. We have a “White Day” in March, when men give gifts to women. I wonder what type of websites had an increase in male visitors in March. Tiffany would be nice. 🙂

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Motoko Hunt

President & Search Marketing Strategist at AJPR

Motoko Hunt manages the SEO for all of Adobe's properties in Japan and the APAC region. Prior to joining Adobe, Motoko established AJPR in 1998; she has been providing search marketing consulting services targeting Japan and Asia to companies around the world. Her services have made a big impact on the search marketing campaigns of some of the world's most popular multi-national brands. A number of her articles have been published on industry websites and printed media including MultiLingual Computing and the International Journal of Localisation. She also writes about the Japanese online market on her blog at AJPR and contributes to several online magazines in Japan and Asia. She served as a member of the board of directors of SEMPO in 2010-2012, and is a chairperson of the SEMPO Asia-Pacific Committee.

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