世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey conducted by goo Research into what brands people associate with internet services. Over three days at the start of February 1,083 people from their monitor group successfully completed a private online questionnaire. The male-female split was half-and-half to three significant digits; there was one more male than female respondent. 13.5% were in their teens, 11.5% in their twenties, 14.9% in their thirties, 18.2% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 22.0% in their sixties.

On a statistical note, recently goo Research’s samples seem to be more balanced both sex and age-wise; they used to be around 55:45 male to female and biased towards the thirties age group, but this is the second time recently I’ve noticed a more balanced age spread.

I reported on a similar survey conducted this time last year, so it may be instructive to cross-reference. Google has surpassed Yahoo! for search; this trend is also visible, but not so strongly, in actual search engine use. Regarding shopping, Rakuten Marketplace retains their huge lead over Amazon, perhaps due in part to their bordering-on-spam use (abuse!) that they make of your mail address, one reason I will never shop there. They do not have a one-click unsubscribe option, and they freely share your mail address between all the shops there. Even if you just use the Y-Not! free email greeting card service that they bought out last year, they automatically subscribe you to their system and pass the address on to their shops. You have been warned!

When asked about where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a mobile phone service provider, the top answer was NTT DoCoMo with 56.0%, then au with 26.9%, SoftBank with 11.0%, and the remaining 6.1% split in an unreported fashion between other providers and the don’t knows.

Q1: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a search site? (Sample size=1,083, free answer)

Google	48.7%
Yahoo! JAPAN	41.8%
goo	6.1%
MSN	2.0%
Infoseek (Infoseek Rakuten)	0.7%
Ask.jp	0.0%
livedoor	0.0%
Other	0.2%
Don’t know	0.5%

When asked about where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about web mail, the results roughly followed last year’s figures: Yahoo! mail was still out in the lead with 43.8%, next was Hotmail, even though it dropped 10 percentage points down to 30.7%. Google’s Gmail still struggles to get mindshare in Japan, with just 4.4% naming it.

Q2: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a shopping site? (Sample size=1,083, free answer)

Rakuten Marketplace	65.7%
Amazon	23.3%
Yahoo! Shopping	7.9%
Netprice	0.6%
Bidders	0.2%
Livedoor Department Store	0.0%
Other	0.6%
Don’t know	1.8%

Q3: Where instinctively comes to mind when thinking about a movie sharing service? (Sample size=1,083, free answer)

YouTube	43.6%
mixi movies	5.0%
PhotoZou	1.7%
Ask Video	1.1%
DivX Stage6	0.9%
Ameba Vision	0.7%
MySpace	0.4%
Other	0.5%
Don’t know	46.3%

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