New under-the-radar Q&A site making waves

By Ken Y-N ( September 2, 2008 at 22:26) · Filed under Internet, Polls, Statistics

There was a short report on IT Media about a new female-oriented site that is threatening to break into the big time. This under-the-radar idiom is お化けサイト, obake saito, or ghost/monster site. At least I hope that’s what the meaning is!

The site is entitled 発言小町, hatsugen komachi, or in English Talk Town might be a reasonable translation, a sub-site on the Yomiuri Shimbun’s site. Although the monthly unique visitors from home computers are a factor of ten to twenty behind the big boys, the average time spent per unique visitor is far ahead of the competition, as this chart shows.

Site Name	Monthly uniques	Monthly usage (h:mm:ss)	Site genre
Hatsugen Komachi	670,000	1:21:50	Bulletin board
YouTube	18,320,000	1:17:38	Video viewing
2 channel	9,400,000	0:56:19	Bulletin board
Yahoo! Chiebukuro	13,230,000	0:13:03	Q&A site
Oshiete! goo	6,420,000	0:05:08	Q&A site

One important issue when comparing sites is that the user profile is older and female-biased, as the following tables show.

Site name	Male	Female
Hatsugen Komachi	46	54
YouTube	58	42
2 channel	60	40
Yahoo! Chiebukuro	54	46
Oshiete! goo	54	46

Site name	Teenagers	20-29 years old	30-39 years old	40-49 years old	50 years old and over
Hatsugen Komachi	7%	10%	36%	30%	17%
YouTube	27%	12%	21%	25%	16%
2 channel	16%	11%	28%	29%	16%
Yahoo! Chiebukuro	16%	12%	27%	27%	18%
Oshiete! goo	12%	13%	29%	28%	19%

Looking at other articles, two of the main selling points of the site to the female population are that all posts are moderated before posting and that the a lot of the highlighted content on the front page reads like the problem page of a woman’s magazine.

Story from the Japanese original on IT Media.

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