Japan's big SNS site to post nearly 700% up profit
On July 29, GREE (gree.jp), one of the biggest SNS sites in Japan, announced its financial report from June. The report shows that they had 374% increase in sales and 696% increase in profit compare to June of last year. Since last year, GREE has been promoting the services through TV commercials and partnerships with […]
Japanese ccTLD is getting interesting
7 organizations such as Internet Associations in Japan are getting together to set up Japanese Internet Domain Name Conference (the final name may change). The main purpose of the conference is to set the regulations and standards for new Japanese ccTLD related issues, and to select contractors in Japan. In addition to currently available ccTLDs […]
Ask.jp will close on June 25
Ask.jp announced that they will end the search service on June 25. They ad services has been ended in May. The search services include web, blog, products and category search. Ask opened its beta version in August 2004, and the official version in February 2005. They have been struggling to gain the market share in […]
Yahoo Japan to provide free analytic tool
Yahoo Japan has been providing the analytic tool for Geocities Plus (paid) Members since March 2009, and just announced that the tool is now available for free to all registered (Yahoo ID holders) users. This easy to user tool has been improved by listening the feedback from users for the past several months, and they […]
Multilingual-Search Editor – Motoko Hunt – wins SEMPO President’s award
Motoko Hunt has won the Inaugural President’s Award from the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO). Motoko has been a consistent and hardworking contributor to Multilingual-Search with great insights on the Japanese search market. We cannot think of anyone more deserving! Congratulations! Keep up the good work! As reported by David Temple – also a […]
Japanese Internet market is still growing
Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications released the latest Internet population data in Japan. According to the report, there were more than 90.9 million Internet users in Japan as of January 2009, which is 2.8 million more than the date from January 2008. The data also shows there were 82.55 million Internet users from […]
21.7million Japanese visited YouTube in Feb'09
According to comScore Japan’s access ranking report on entertainment sites for February 2009, 45.7 million Japanese visited entertainment sites during the month of February, which is about 74% of Internet users in Japan. (The data includes the accesses from PC at offices and homes, and doesn’t include the accesses from mobile, PDA, or PC accesses […]
Google Japan's pay-per-post fiasco
On February 5, Google introduced its new top page with “Hot new keywords” below the search box. As I reported here before, Google in Asia (not only Japan but also Korea, China etc.) has added links with icon below the search box last year hoping to improve visitor’s experience at Google. Basically, Google realized that […]
Yahoo Japan to end video-cast services
Yahoo Japan announced that they will discontinue Yahoo video-cast services after April 5, 2009. Starting February 16, 2009, they will no longer accept new video uploading through the service. All of the uploaded videos will be deleted on April 5, 2009. They recommend their partner sites NicoNico Douga and Zoom for video uploading and distribution […]
Japan's biggest BBS site "2ch" was aquired by foreign company
Even after mixi, gree, facebook and twitter, BBS sites are still popular in Japan. The biggest BBS site in Japan, “2ch” is where you can hear all the gossip about… just about everything you want to know. There was a rumor back in late 2007 that the owner wanted to close the site. Instead, Hirouki […]