Last week, they announced the changes with minimum bidding cost, which is currently 9yen (35yen for some categories). Starting in August, the minimum bidding cost will be adjusted according to the importance & the value of keywords and the quality of keywords & the ads. It means that your current bid amount may not reach the new minimum bid amount, in which case your campaign for that keyword or the ad group may be turned off for not meeting the minimum cost. If you are running a campaign with Overture, keep a close eye on the campaign.

They also announced the plan to introduce “Interest Match” this fall. It serves the ads based on the search user’s interests. The content on viewed pages, page view history, search history, age, gender, etc. will be considered to calculate the interests. They plan to first begin the service with PC site, then to begin the service with mobile about a month later.

As you may know, Softbank won the contract for iPhone in Japan, which means that Yahoo Japan (owned by Softbank) becomes it’s official web portal and the search engine.

Here, you can see new Yahoo Japan for iPhone. You can click each icon to see the service screen. Yahoo for iPhone can be used from iPod Touch, too.

Yahoo said that you can search both web sites and mobile sites from iPhone.

“Because Google and Yahoo! have a strong presence in many Asia-Pacific countries, they account for the majority of searches conducted in the overall region,” said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. “However, there are several strong, local country search engines that also play a significant role in the region. Most notably, the dominant search engine in China, Baidu.com, accounts for one out of every six searches in Asia-Pacific notwithstanding the fact that its users are primarily from China.”

What interesting is that 5 out of the Top 10 Search Properties in Asia-Pacific (April 2008) were the region based engines such as Korea’s Naver and China’s Alibaba.

comScore’s data also shows the country by country breakdown of Internet audience in the region. China ranks #1 with 82,814,000 unique searchers and Japan ranks #2 with 60,050,000 unique searchers. Korean searchers have most number of searches per searcher (103.5) followed by Japan’s 102.6 searches per searcher.

If you have products or services targeting Japanese men, add comparison information on your website, and if your products or services are targeting Japanese women, try free sample offering to see if the RIO improves.

The majority of Facebook revenue comes from advertising. Facebook plans to sell the ads on Facebook Japan to Japanese businesses as they gain more memberships in Japan.

- Check the web pages indexed in YST by specifying URL or domain.
- Check when the pages are crawled and which language is identified by YST.
- Request YST to crawl the site with sitemap.
- Check pages linking to the web site and/or pages.
- Check the number of bookmarks to the pages, and the mentioning of the pages in Yahoo blog. (Unique to Japanese version)

[Top 5 Japanese Websites for March 2008]

Rank Property Unique Visitor (K)
1 Yahoo 44,031
2 Google 34,305
3 Rakuten 29,344
4 Microsoft 29,252
5 FC2 Inc. 27,608

Note: The ranking is based on unique visitors to the each property. For example, Yahoo’s number includes the visitors to all of Yahoo property (Yahoo shopping, Yahoo auction, Yahoo news, etc.). The number excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Sure, being listed (linked) in popular portal sites such as “goo” and “Biglobe” helps, but it’s also a fact that my clients, who are not using the listing services, are doing just fine and ranking within top 10 (often times #1 and #2) in these search engines. The companies, who are willing to invest $400 to $1000 for the listing service, are most likely to invest in optimizing their site and the pages, too, and that’s probably the main reason for the good ranking. What I’m looking at now is the effects of Yahoo bookmark in the Yahoo search results. I’ve seen many Hatena’s bookmarked pages ranking well in Google’s search results, and I’m sure that Yahoo’s bookmark gives additional “kick” to the page’s ranking.

The cafe will stay in business till 24th.

NTT Resonant and “goo” used to run one of Japan’s original search engine “goo”, which is currently powered by Google Japan. They have been focusing onto the specialty search engines including images, dictionary and news, for the past several years.

In Japan, YouTube is very popular and they opened Japanese site in 2007. Also, NicoNico Douga is very popular with its unique comment function that comments submitted by viewers show up on video.

Currently, mixi has 17mil registered users. You need an invitation from existing member to join. They have free membership and premium membership (fee) for additional services. mixi’s mobile service has been gaining popularity, too.

This is a good news.
Since many Japanese go straight to Rakuten without using the search when they have an idea of what they want to buy, I’ve been recommending some of my clients to set up a merchant account with Rakuten. Though they let foreign businesses to open an account, the process is all done in Japanese. Once their European office is open, it would be much easier for non-Japanese businesses especially the ones in Europe to work with them.

[Top mobile shoppers]
- All generations (37%)
- Women in 30s (47%)
- Women in 20s (44%)
- Men in 10s (44%)

[Top mobile shopping categories]
- Clothing, accessories & fashion (28%)
- Books & magazines (27%)
- CD, video & DVD (23%)

The survey also shows that 22% of the survey participants have used the net auction services from mobile, and 62% of the users have purchased items/services compared to only 34% have sold items/services at the auction sites from mobile.

Currently, more than 4000 businesses and 25000 people’s data have been indexed. The users can create his/her business profile at SBI Business.

Mobaga Town (mbga.jp) is currently one of the most popular mobile sites in Japan. In addition to SNS and gaming services, it provides services including shopping, news feed, decomail (email decoration tool).

5710 mil yen: “In-House” SEO marketing
2600 mil yen: Out-sourced SEO marketing
1650 mil yen: Tool, etc.

They think that the SEO market will continue to have a healthy growth in Japan, and become 17.6 bil yen market by 2011.

Baidu’s spider has been crawling aggressively to index Japanese pages since they announced the plan to open Japanese site about a year ago, but because of the aggressive crawling, many site owners have set a tag to avoid Baidu spider to crawl their sites. Which means that their index data is not as good as that of other major search engines in Japan. I’m afraid that search users may not find what they are looking for in the search results at least for a while. I’m sure they’ll adjust the crawl pattern soon, especially after the official opening.

By the way, I hate having to print out coupons even when it’s a great deal. Many businesses in Japan now accept the deals by showing the coupon (e-mail with coupon) on cell phone without printing it out. I hope this service comes to this side of the Pacific ocean soon!