世論 What Japan Thinks

Recently (how recently is not stated!) goo Research published this survey on blog awareness and usage in Japan, their 19th survey in their series on blogging. 1,042 Internet users aged from teens to their 50s were surveyed, with 58.83% (uggh, what’s with the two decimal places? I’ll round to one for the rest of this story) of the sample women. The following results were obtained:

Q: Within the last month, have you looked at someone else’s blog?

Yes	75.4%
No	18.9%
Don’t know what a blog is	5.7%

The viewers percentage has tripled since their first survey last April and the don’t knows have decreased from almost 41% first time out.

Q: Within the last month, have you posted a comment on someone else’s blog?

	All	Male	Female
Yes	25.4%	22.2%	27.8%
No	74.6%	77.8%	72.2%

Q:Have you made a blog yourself?

Yes	27.2%
No but I want to try sometime	33.3%
No, and don’t plan to	32.2%
Don’t know what a blog is	7.3%

The number not knowing what a blog is has increased! Perhaps people paniced at this question and realised they didn’t really understand things after all?

There now follows a large table describing what blogs people use, but rather than reproduce the whole lot, the highlights from the sample of 283 bloggers are livedoor leading at 17.7%, down from 23.4% last time (last month?); goo at 16.2% down from 17.7%; and Rakuten at 15.2% from 15.6%. Yahoo! and not listed others are the only gainers, 2% and 4% respectively.

One reason for more losers than winners is that the question allows multiple answers. The last time the average blogger used just under one and a half services; this time it is just under 1.4 services, suggesting either people are keeping less blogs or moving their blogs to a single provider.

Q: About how often do you update your blog? (Sample size=283)

Daily or so	21.9%
Twice or thrice a week	26.9%
Once a week	13.8%
Twice or thrice a month	14.1%
Once a month	5.6%
Once every two or three months	6.7%
Less than once every six months	11%

Q: Has your blog received a trackback? (Sample size=283 I think)

	All	Male	Female
Yes	68.2%	72.6%	65.5%
No	31.8%	27.4%	34.5%

On the other hand, only 33.9% have sent a trackback to another blog.

Q: Do you use an affiliate (cash-for-clicks) program? (Sample size=283)

I participate in one already	16.6%
I definitely want to join one	26.5%
I want to join one	25.1%
I don’t really want to join one	14.8%
I don’t want to join one	6.4%
Don’t know	10.6%

Finally, bloggers and those who wanted to be bloggers were asked what were the three most important factors when selecting a blog service to build a blog in. Of the 630 respondents, the top three answers were “Easy to make” at 77.5%, “Easy to understand management system” at 59.0%, and finally “Freedom of layout” at 37.1%. Strangely, I thought, magazine recommendations was right down at the bottom, less than 1% selecting it as a key factor.