Almost one in three Japanese bloggers have quit
japan.internet.com recently published extracted highlights from goo Research’s 28th regular blogging survey. This time, one of the reported statistics was on why people quit. At the start of November 1,041 members of goo Research’s monitor pool replied to the online questionnaire. 53.5% of the sample was female, 2.3% in their teens, 24.0% in their twenties, 38.7% in their thirties, 21.7% in their forties, 10.1% in their fifties, and 3.2% aged sixty or older.
I felt the answers to the quitting reason were a bit difficult to interpret (from a logical point of view, not from a translation one!), especially the top reason, given by over two-thirds, of updating being just too much of a pain - 「更新が面倒になったから」, “henshin ga mendouni nattakara”. I’ve not used the Japanese blogging services so I don’t know how user-friendly they are, but was it formatting the content that was awkward, or maintaining the design, pruning spam, replying to comments, or other housekeeping tasks?
For me personally, I’ve thought about quitting for time reasons and a lack of search engine positioning; I don’t try any particular SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques, but with nearly 500 distinct articles in Google and friends, I get a disappointingly low number of visits - I just recently got through 200 per day excluding one dodgy pr0n keyword that gives me just a bit too much traffic.
Q1: Within the last month have you viewed someone else’s blog? (Sample size=1,041)
Yes 80.5% No 17.1% Don’t really know what a blog is 2.4% Note that 83.1% of women versus 77.5% of men had viewed a blog in the last month.
Q2: Have you made a blog yourself? (Sample size=1,041)
Currently maintaining one 28.7% Used to maintain one (to SQ) 12.8% No, but want to make one 21.9% No, and don’t want to make one 32.9% Don’t really know what a blog is 3.8% Q2SQ: Why did you quit blogging? (Sample size=133, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Updating was too much trouble 89 66.9% Got bored with it 29 21.8% SNS (mixi, etc) is more fun 23 17.3% Ran out of things to say 22 16.5% No particular reason 17 12.8% Too few visitors 13 9.8% Got hit by flame war, spam attack, etc 3 2.3% Other 9 6.8% Next, there was a question for the current bloggers on how often they updated. The top frequency was twice or thrice a week, with 30.8% posting that often. Next was daily with 24.8%, then once a week with 19.7%. In total, just about three-quarters updated at least once a week.
Asked why they blogged, the top answer was just as a sort of notebook, then to share information with others, then to let others know my own opinions.
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Shari said,
November 24, 2006 @ 10:18
I’ve said it before but it can’t hurt to say it again. I hope that you don’t give up on blogging as I visit every day and use the content you create as part of some of my lessons. I think it’s an extremely valuable resource both for teachers and for those who want to learn more about modern Japan.
I am very grateful for the work you do.
Garrett said,
November 24, 2006 @ 22:58
Who knew udon was so popular?
If it makes you feel any better, you’re a hit on Technorati and seem to be the link that holds a lot of English Japan blogs together.
Ken Y-N said,
November 26, 2006 @ 23:12
Shari, thats for the support, but no, I’m not planning on quitting - in the first half of the year, though, it was getting a bit of a slog, though, but I’m enjoying translating these days.
Garrett, thanks for the kind words too! Yes, that udon one has also been quite a hit on Google and I’m now only second to Wikipedia when you search for that word from the Japan site!
Ken said,
November 30, 2006 @ 03:19
Yeah, Ken, I really hope you don’t quit as well. I did mean to ask you - do you mean 200 visits a day total, or 200 a day through just the search engines?
I’m curious since I do SEO/web marketing for a living…you might want to email me the answers ken at recognizedesign dot com
Here’s an idea: Change the end of your title tag to read: 世論 - What Japan Thinks - Japanese Opinion Polls, Marketing Data and Japanese Market Research Translated into English
The title tag and the link text (strong keywords) of internal links are gold. You have lots of incoming links, so optimizing those will show results.
Ken Y-N said,
November 30, 2006 @ 08:31
Hi Ken,
I mean 200 hits per day through search engines, 85% Google or so, although the last couple of days thanks to that keyword, as well as about 40% of my traffic being for it, there seems to have been a knock-on effect on legitimate traffic, although at the same time a backlink from Wikipedia hit all the Wiki mirrors.
Google is strange that way though - every time I get a hit story, my traffic seems to ramp up a level.
I’ll try your suggestion about the title and see what happens - a goal of mine is to get number one spot for “japan opinion poll”, and I’m 8th at the moment…