世論 What Japan Thinks

I run an ad blocker, although I keep Google ads live (and I hope you do too!) as they are mostly pretty lightweight and quick to load, and most importantly usually text-only. I do very occasionally click search ads but don’t really find them that useful, and this recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and performed by JR Tokai Express Research Inc into web search showed that a lot of Japanese do too.

Demographics

Over the 3rd and 4th of March 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was male, 3.6% in their teens, 15.2% in their twenties, 37.6% in their thirties, 25.8% in their forties, 9.1% in their fifties, 5.8% in their sixties, and 3.0% aged seventy or older.

Note that because many television and print advertisements feature search keywords rather than URLs, rather than engage in SEO activities to naturally boost a product’s home page the companies buy advertising space on the major search engines, thus, perhaps, Japanese people pay more attention to the sponsored links.

From what I’ve heard, if you want to advertise Google of course gives you the largest audience, but Yahoo!’s customers are more click-happy and keen to buy, although Yahoo! has a higher minimum cost per click charge. MSN/Windows Live seems actually to be the best from an overall package point of view, but looking at the results below, if you’re trying to sell in Japan you won’t see much business!

Research results

Q1: When looking for a web site, how many search engines do you use? (Sample size=330)

One	37.0%
Two	42.1%
Three	14.5%
Four or more	5.5%
Don’t use search to find web sites	0.9%

Not surprisingly if you’ve read other surveys on search results, Yahoo! JAPAN and Google were the most popular by far, with MSN/Windows Live Search a long way behind in third.

Q2: Have you ever clicked advertisements above or to the right of search results? (Sample size=330)

Yes (to SQ)	67.3%
No	28.5%
Don’t know	3.3%
Didn’t know there are adverts	0.9%
Other	0.0%

Q2SQ: Do you feel these sponsored links, sponsored sites are useful? (Sample size=222)

Very useful	4.5%
Useful	9.7%
Useful to some extent	38.8%
Don’t care if they are there or not	38.5%
Better not to have them	8.2%
Other	0.3%