Rakuten, who is one of Japan’s biggest and most successful e-commerce companies announced that they invested US$100 million to Pinterest. In recent years, Rakuten has been aiming to replicate their success in Japan in the global market. They [...]]]> Rakuten, who is one of Japan’s biggest and most successful e-commerce companies announced that they invested US$100 million to Pinterest. In recent years, Rakuten has been aiming to replicate their success in Japan in the global market. They have aquired Buy.com in 2010, and Kobo in 2011. They’ve been also making more acquisitions and investments in Asian and Europe.

Rakuten said that there were many overlap between e-commerce and social media, and the deal would reinforce their social part of the businesses.

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Yahoo!, SoftBank and Alibaba Group jointly announced that they have reached an agreement on Alipay. Under the agreement, Alibaba Group will continue participating in Alipay’s future financial performance, including a future IPO or other liquidity events. The agreement structures the [...]]]> Yahoo!, SoftBank and Alibaba Group jointly announced that they have reached an agreement on Alipay. Under the agreement, Alibaba Group will continue participating in Alipay’s future financial performance, including a future IPO or other liquidity events. The agreement structures the relationship between Taobao and Alipay in order to preserve the value within Taobao, which provides that Alibaba group is appropriately compensated for the value of Alipay.

Alipay provides the payment processing services to Alibaba Group and some affiliates including Taobao, which is the largest online retail website in China, and to the third parties.

The agreement seems to be welcomed by all three parties. Jack Ma, Alibaba group’s chairman and CEO said, “The agreement is good for Alibaba Group and it’s stakeholders, as well as customers, employees and shareholders.” Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz said, “As a result of this constructive process, we have an agreement that preserves the value of Taobao, provides for profit sharing at Alipay, and creates a structure to allow Alibaba Group to participate if Alipay’s value is realized in an IPO or other liquidity event.” Masayoshi Son, Soft Bank CEO also said, “This agreement was in part made possible by the strong long-term relationship and trust that exists between the principals at Alibaba Group, Yahoo and SoftBank, and also lays the foundation for Alibaba Group to continue its impressive growth under the dynamic leadership of Jack Ma.”

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Yahoo Japan announced that their year on year net profit rose 7.69% in last quarter (April-June) in advertising revenue.
When Yahoo Japan decided to adopt Google’s technology in its web searches in last December, many expressed their concern that it [...]]]> Yahoo Japan announced that their year on year net profit rose 7.69% in last quarter (April-June) in advertising revenue.
When Yahoo Japan decided to adopt Google’s technology in its web searches in last December, many expressed their concern that it could have negative impact on Yahoo Japan’s business in 2011. However, they’ve been recording a continued increase in revenue.
For the past quarter, Yahoo Japan’s operating profit also increased 3.3% to ¥38.83 billion from ¥37.61 billion, while revenue rose 1.9% to ¥71.88 billion from ¥70.51 billion. They expect its net profit to be in a ¥46.01 billion to ¥47.31 billion range for the first half ending Sept. 30.

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Yahoo Japan will run a Yahoo Point Campaign in March. During a month of March, all registered users (Yahoo ID is required) will gain Yahoo points every time they search. Members can use Yahoo points to pay for several services [...]]]> Yahoo Japan will run a Yahoo Point Campaign in March. During a month of March, all registered users (Yahoo ID is required) will gain Yahoo points every time they search. Members can use Yahoo points to pay for several services including Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and Yahoo Travel.

Detail: http://search.yahoo.co.jp/campaign/2011a/ (in Japanese)

It’s an interesting campaign, but why you should pay (give away points) for the use of search? Are they hoping to keep current Yahoo search users from going to other search engines? I wonder if they started to see any changes in the search user trend since the organic search was switched to be powered by Google…

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Aun Consulting announced that Japanese SEO industry grew to 194 billion yen market in 2010, which was a 18.6% growth from 2009. According to the report, SEO outsourcing category grew 22%, SEO In-house category grew 19% and SEO Tool industry [...]]]> Aun Consulting announced that Japanese SEO industry grew to 194 billion yen market in 2010, which was a 18.6% growth from 2009. According to the report, SEO outsourcing category grew 22%, SEO In-house category grew 19% and SEO Tool industry grew 6%.
Aun predicts that the SEO industry in Japan will grow to 220 billion yen market in 2011.

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When Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced its plan for search service tie-up (both organic search and PPC services) in July, Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) gave a statement that they didn’t think it would violate the Antitrust (or Competition) [...]]]> When Yahoo Japan and Google Japan announced its plan for search service tie-up (both organic search and PPC services) in July, Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) gave a statement that they didn’t think it would violate the Antitrust (or Competition) Law.

Last month, Rakuten submitted a report and a request to investigate the tie-up to JFTC, and now JFTC is interviewing organizations and businesses including Microsoft as a part of the investigation.
At the same time, several members of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party have formed “The Internet Search Issues Investigation Group” to create a bill to assure fair search and online advertising services by picking up issues that may not be regulated by the Antitrust Law.

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DeNA and Yahoo’s social gaming platform for PC, “Yahoo! Mobage” launched its β version. It is available for free of charge.

“Yahoo! Mobage” is a social gaming platform, which lets users play games that are linked PCs and mobile. It also [...]]]> DeNA and Yahoo’s social gaming platform for PC, “Yahoo! Mobage” launched its β version. It is available for free of charge.

“Yahoo! Mobage” is a social gaming platform, which lets users play games that are linked PCs and mobile. It also lets users use the community functions that they’ve been using at DeNA’s mobile “Mobaga-town” from PC.
The service starts on October 1, the content will be delivered over 100 titles from its 70+ development partners.

Yahoo Mobaga: http://yahoo-mbga.jp/

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Yahoo and Google have come to the agreement on the partnership in Japanese market. It was officially announced on each blog on July 27th. While the effective date is yet to be decided, according to the announcements, we can expect [...]]]> Yahoo and Google have come to the agreement on the partnership in Japanese market. It was officially announced on each blog on July 27th. While the effective date is yet to be decided, according to the announcements, we can expect below changes.

1. Yahoo’s organic search will be powered by Google, though each site would have a room to make the results their own. (You won’t get exactly the same results from them.)
2. Yahoo will adopt Google’s PPC platform for their PPC services. The accounts will be handled separately.
3. Yahoo will feed content data from Yahoo shopping, Q&A, etc. to Google for their blended search results.

See Yahoo’s official blog, Google’s official blog, and my post on the topic.

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Japan’s biggest e-commerce site Rakuten announced that it will acquire Buy.com Inc for $250 million, foraying into the U.S. market for the first time as it steps up its push to expand overseas.

Earlier this year, Rakuten announced a joint venture [...]]]> Japan’s biggest e-commerce site Rakuten announced that it will acquire Buy.com Inc for $250 million, foraying into the U.S. market for the first time as it steps up its push to expand overseas.

Earlier this year, Rakuten announced a joint venture with China’s top search engine Baidu to launch a virtual shopping mall targeting the world’s largest online population and has said it is also looking at opportunities to enter European and other markets.

According to Rakuten’s statement, Buy.com (based in California) had revenue of $62.5 million in 2009 and has a client base of about 14 million for its electronic commerce operations.

Rakuten also runs operations in Taiwan and Thailand.

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Earlier this month, UCC coffee, one of the popular coffee manufactures in Japan, made a big mess on Twitter in a matter of days. Here’s what happened.

They have been running “Good Coffee Smile Campaign” since 1999 using mas-media. This [...]]]> Earlier this month, UCC coffee, one of the popular coffee manufactures in Japan, made a big mess on Twitter in a matter of days. Here’s what happened.

They have been running “Good Coffee Smile Campaign” since 1999 using mas-media. This year, they decided to use Twitter in addition to ads on TV, newspaper and magazines. On Feb 5, they set up 11 bot accounts to push tweets to people, who used words such as “coffee” “ucc” and “campaign”. Immediately, this “campaign” back-fired, and on Feb 7, they suspended Twitter campaigns and posted an apology on one of the accounts.

This shows how different social media is from the traditional advertising and the marketing. You should never use social media to “push” something. If you are not willing to communicate – socialize with the people, you should stick to banner ads.

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During the interview with Nikkei Business, Yahoo Japan’s president Inoue said that he wasn’t impressed by some of the popular Google services such as Street View, Book Search and AdWords.
He thinks that those services are either in the “gray [...]]]> During the interview with Nikkei Business, Yahoo Japan’s president Inoue said that he wasn’t impressed by some of the popular Google services such as Street View, Book Search and AdWords.
He thinks that those services are either in the “gray area (of the law)” or copies of someone else’s services, and Yahoo Japan’s legal department would never allow the company to offer them.

Also during the interview, he commented that the smartphone market would have a huge shift, especially in the application related market, when the non-business users become a big part of smartphone user base.

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Motoko Hunt – AJPR

94 million users

4% using devices other than PC or mobile, such as TV and Playstation

90% 14-49 are on the internet

99% of business with 50% of them on Ecommece

Country code in japanese characters starting next year

Google is increasing [...]]]> Motoko Hunt – AJPR

94 million users

4% using devices other than PC or mobile, such as TV and Playstation

90% 14-49 are on the internet

99% of business with 50% of them on Ecommece

Country code in japanese characters starting next year

Google is increasing penetration (google now just over 50%)

Verticals are doing well in jp – YAHOO! shopping etc.

MOBILE – 74 million users are mobile 50% using filtering – 1.3 Billion US in advertising

SOCIAL MEDIA 10% of business has some sort of social media

Unique in jp langiuage is they do not use space to separate words !

keywords – research is very important

localisation is essential – what’s appealing to an audience may not (and probably isn’t) appealing to another audience.

Koichiro Fukasawa – Wasabi Communications

Japan mobile technology is very advanced – 102 million subscribers (9 out of 10 users using the mobile web). more than 1/3 of subscribers are on a flat rate program – new phone models launched every season with more and more features, something of a new culture where sub cultures are born.

Mobile is used to make a payment, buy a train ticket, pay for Mac Donalds, or ticket concerts (“flash the mobile phone) mobile phones with very high resolutions: radio and watch TV is popular and common with mobile phones video on demand, gps, coupons, shopping sites … oh yeah and you can also use a phone to make phone calls ☺

Mobile SEO in Japan

must focus on official carrier sites (3) + YAHOO! mobile and Google Mobile, 5 websites in all

For mobil link building links from directories are effective – search algorithms not very sophisticated

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The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South [...]]]> The Mobile Marketing Association announced the results of its Annual Global Mobile Attitude and Usage Study conducted in 2008. The markets surveyed in the Asia Pacific segment of the study include: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. It shows the strong market opportunity for mobile marketers in APAC region.

The study’s key findings for the selected Asia Pacific markets include:

* Overall, heavy penetration and reliance on mobile phones combine with strong feature and mobile web usage in these regions to indicate strong market opportunity for mobile marketers.
o In total, the top five mobile phone features used are non-voice in nature and include camera, games, text messaging, saving images to a photo library and MP3 player.
o Strong use of text messaging and mobile web (61% and 36% overall respectively) indicates mobile phone users in these regions are willing to view their mobile devices as full scale communication devices not restricted to voice services.

* Over one-third report using mobile web and one-in-five use it on a weekly basis.
o Common applications include news, browsing the internet, accessing mobile specific sites, and visiting sites related to music, weather and entertainment.

* Overall receptiveness and interest in opting-in to mobile marketing efforts is fairly strong; nearly half (48%) are moderately/highly interested in mobile marketing and more than half are somewhat/highly likely to opt-in to mobile marketing efforts.
o Applications that garner the greatest interest include mobile coupon, status alerts regarding current accounts or products owned and alerts for special sales and discounts.

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It’s a known fact that Japanese are one of the top users of Social media in the world. Japan was the number 1 country by the number of YouTube users for years, and still now, Japanese spend most time on [...]]]> It’s a known fact that Japanese are one of the top users of Social media in the world. Japan was the number 1 country by the number of YouTube users for years, and still now, Japanese spend most time on YouTube.

Back in April, Yahoo Japan organized GyaO! as its subsidiary, and started new Yahoo/GyaO! video sharing services. Since then, they were able to constantly grow the user base, and according to Nielsen’s report, they became the number 1 Japanese video sharing site in September with 11.9 million users.

YouTube is still the most popular video sharing site among Japanese with 22.48 million users. The previous most popular Japanese video sharing site, NicoNico Douga now has 8 million users.

The report also mentions that while Yahoo/GyaO! site has more users, their users visit the site less frequently and spend less time compared to NicoNico Douga and YouTube users.

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According to a report on “Shopping and E-commerce businesses in Japan” by Fuji-Keizai, the market including catalog shopping, TV shopping, online shopping and mobile shopping, will become $5.4 billion market in 2010, a 109% growth from 2008.

The report also [...]]]> According to a report on “Shopping and E-commerce businesses in Japan” by Fuji-Keizai, the market including catalog shopping, TV shopping, online shopping and mobile shopping, will become $5.4 billion market in 2010, a 109% growth from 2008.

The report also predicts that online shopping will take up more than a half of the market with $27.4 billion sales, and mobile shopping will reach $4 billion by 2010.

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Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.

SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as [...]]]> Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) announced its launch of SEMPO APAC Committee.

SEMPO APAC plans and organizes SEMPO activities in the Asia-Pacific region to educate the market, grow membership and awareness of the Online & Search Marketing Industry, as well as to provide support to working groups under SEMPO APAC. Currently the committee has volunteers from China, Japan, Hong Kong, India, Singapore, Jakarta, Australia and the US. Committee representatives are highly regarded industry professionals in each market, and are frequent speakers at local industry events.

SEMPO APAC’s recent activities include a series of webinars, seminars, networking meetings, an Asia tour with SEMPO leadership conducted in Beijing, Mumbai, and Singapore, as well as market surveys carried out in India, Japan, and Singapore.

“Our development in Asia-Pacific has been inspiring. The teams that have come together to form Working Groups are passionate and continue to drive growth. We are pleased to see the APAC team focus on the broader region to include Australia and surrounding markets. With 41% of the Internet Users in Asia-Pacific, SEMPO will continue to make a commitment in the region. We are thrilled with the Asia-Pacific talent that continues to take leadership roles in SEMPO.” Sara Holoubek, president of SEMPO Board of Directors said. ”

For more information visit http://www.sempo.org/public_groups/apac/ or write to Motoko Hunt (Chair of SEMPO APAC & Multilingual Search editor) apac-chair “at” sempo.org

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The first ad:tech in Japan was held on Sept 2-3 in Tokyo. The agenda had 4 keynotes invited from overseas and a keynote panel by 3 Creative directors and a CEO from Japanese corporations including Dentsu. Innovation was one of [...]]]> The first ad:tech in Japan was held on Sept 2-3 in Tokyo. The agenda had 4 keynotes invited from overseas and a keynote panel by 3 Creative directors and a CEO from Japanese corporations including Dentsu. Innovation was one of the themes of the conference, which had 6 different session tracks including “performance marketing” and “mobile marketing”.
The exhibit hall was full of energy with 30 exhibitors engaging with delegates. Google University and Microsoft Advertising Center / bing Japan each had a separate room.

ad:tech Tokyo was a bilingual conference (English and Japanese), had speakers and delegates from overseas, and provided very unique place for Japanese marketers to hear, learn and network with foreign marketers and professionals in person.

See my note from the event.

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Via Adage, ComScore has revealed the Google share by market showing the Google domination in many markets alongside discrepancies such as Korea where Google has a dismal share of the market. Western Europe has stronger Google shares than [...]]]> Via Adage, ComScore has revealed the Google share by market showing the Google domination in many markets alongside discrepancies such as Korea where Google has a dismal share of the market. Western Europe has stronger Google shares than the US but the Mountain View monolith is most powerful in Brazil, Turkey and Italy.


Unfortunately, with China and Russia missing – the picture is somewhat one-sided.

Google Share by Market – ComScore

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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 [...]]]> 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 other media and sites to increase the membership. As a result, their membership has reached 12.6million by the end of June.

Gaming is one of GREE’s popular services, and the monthly service fee has been an important source of their revenue.

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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 [...]]]> 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 such as “xx.co.jp”, “xx.jp” and “日本語.jp” (any Japanese characters can go in the second-level domain), new Japanese ccTLD using Japanese characters as “xx.日本” (Japanese characters mean “Japan”) will soon become available.

The conference will also explore the possibility of using other Japanese characters　representing area names such as “東京” (Tokyo) in the domain, too. We may see URLs like “www.大学．東京” (universities.tokyo) or “www.ホテル．大阪” (hotels.Osaka) in near future.

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