世論 What Japan Thinks

And they’re also invisible to many of you lot, judging by my data! I mention this as today’s survey is from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into internet advertisements, with this report focusing on the contextual kind.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of August 2010 1,074 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 17.2% in their teens, 18.0% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.5% in their forties, and 26.9% aged fifty or older.

I personally think that most the people who say they haven’t see any contextual adverts in blogs on rews stories are mistaken – many popular news sites run adverts not just in the sidebars, but also have blocks right in the middle of stories, and I feel confident in saying that far less than 30% of the sample are running ad blockers.
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If you’re a learner of Japanese, or just wanting to get hold of classics of Japanese literature, the free repository Aozora is a good place to start, but judging by this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com into Aozora, it’s not that well-known.

Demographics

Over the 19th and 20th of August 2010 1,080 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample were male, 16.15 in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.9% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, 15.5% in their fifties, and 11.9% aged sixty or older.

Despite having said that everybody should read stuff off Aozora, I’ve read a grand total of one book from there. My excuse is that I don’t have a decent e-book reader; however there must be a decent solution for Japanese feature phones which I ought really to investigate!
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Here’s an interesting ranking survey/mathematical trickery that I came across, produced by Japan Brand Strategy Inc, looking at Japanese web site value.

Demographics

Between the 10th and 25th of June 2010 18,600 people completed a public (I believe) internet-based survey, collecting between 1,200 and 1,500 people per web site that offered the survey. Exactly 50% were male, exactly 25% between 18 and 29 years old, 25% in their thirties, 25% in their forties, and 25% between 50 and 69 years old.

To evaluate each site, various factors were taken into consideration, such as how often people visited, what they did on the site (eg user registration, contacting the site), why they accessed, their evaluation of the contents, appearance, ease of use, usefulness of information, whether they would visit again, if they made purchases or researched purchases, if they made repeat site visits, whether they would purchase again, and other aspects. Japan Brand Strategy Inc then massaged the results to place numerical yen values on the number of visitors and the type of actions visitors took, and how much visitors used the site information to influence purchasing decisions.

For the full list of the 232 rates sites, please visit the original web page.
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A recent survey by goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, looked at IT-related technical terms.

Demographics

Between the 30th of July and the 3rd of August 2010 1,077 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.9% of the sample were male, 16.5% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, 15.7% in their fifties, and 12.1 aged sixty or older.

At work I often hear technical terms being bandied around that I think people either don’t understand, have misunderstood, or even worse, have taken on a specific meaning throughout the company not really related to the original definition. My two pet hates are “cloud” for “hetrogeneous network” and “black box” for “immutable interfaces”.
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A recent very detailed survey from goo Research, in conjuction with social media consultants Looops Communications, took a look at corporate Twitter accounts.

Demographics

Between the 9th and 12th of July 2010 315 members of the goo Research online monitor group who used a corporate Twitter account as part of their job completed a private internet-based questionnaire. Sex and age demographics were not reported as they were not particularly significant; instead company size and industry was reported. 32.1% worked in companies of under 10 employees, 27.0% between 10 and 99 employees, 21.0% between 100 and 999 employees, 19.0% with 1,000 or more employees, and 1.0% just didn’t know. 22.9% were in manufacturing, 10.2% in distribution or small shops, 5.4% in finance, 55.9% in service industries, and 5.7% other.

Note that although the sample is small, all the respondents were corporate Tweeters, so the accuracy of the data should be high.

My employer just released a new corporate social media hub site, combining Twitter and YouTube feeds. There might also be a blog, but I’ll be surprised if it is anything other than just a press release archive. I don’t think there’s an active mixi account, and there’s certainly no Facebook account for the Japanese side.
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A recent survey from goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into chat services found that more people were aware of, and used, internet telephone than instant messaging services.

Demographics

On the 5th of August 2010 1,069 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.7% of the sample were male, 17.0% in their teens, 17.5% in their twenties, 21.0% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 16.0% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Back in March I translated identical questions from a different survey company. That time the sample was only 300 people, so one would expect this goo Research one to be more accurate, but even still it’s hard to explain why the last time the top four were MSN text, Yahoo! text, Skype voice and Skype text, but this time is a reversal with Skype voice, Skype text, Yahoo! text and MSN text.
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Around two in five of the online population questioned here to be precise have heard of it, although usage of PayPal is still very low according to this survey from goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com.

Demographics

Between the 28th of July and the 1st of Augut 2010 1,079 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.4% of the sample were male, 16.4% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.2% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, 15.8% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

I’ve bought from the US, the UK and Australia through PayPal, although it’s always for software or services. My most frequent transactions are with Namecheap for domain name purchase – I can’t recommend them enough, especially if like me you’d got fed up with GoDaddy’s upselling every time you try to make a simple transaction. If you do decide to use them, don’t forget that they also have an official coupon code blog where you can get a few cents or dollars off each transaction.
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Here’s a survey from goo Ranking that will probably hold true all over the world, I might be a Twitter addict if….

Demographics

Between the 21st and 23rd of June 2010 1,137 members of the goo Research online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 65.1% of the sample were female, 8.0% in their teens, 20.4% in their twenties, 31.2% in their thirties, 23.9% in their forties, 9.2% in their fifties, and 7.2 aged sixty or older. Note that the score in the results refers to the relative number of votes for each option, not a percentage of the total sample.

I don’t think I suffer from any of the below. Note that Tweeting in the bath is very much possible in Japan as many phones are waterproof, or at least splashproof.
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A few months ago I remember seeing a news segment on internet-based social lending services, but I cannot say the idea appealed to me.

Demographics

Between the 21st and 26th of July 2010 1,073 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.9% of the sample were male, 15.8% were in their teens, 18.5% in their twenties, 20.8% in their thirties, 16.7% in their forties, 16.0% in their fifties, and 12.2% aged sixty or older.

Social lending services are basically online swap services. The one I saw on the television was points-based. Lending stuff out gained you points, borrowing stuff cost you points. Much of the stuff being circulated was household goods; items seemed to spend a month with one family before moving directly on to another, and another. However, rather than being something like, say, a high-end espresso maker, most of the items seemed to be not worth much more than the postage they would cost. Brand clothes and bags seemed to be another line that I could at least understand the attraction of.
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Here’s a great survey from iShare, looking at the potentially rather dull subject of search engines, but by examining the relationship between usage patterns and browser choice they uncover interesting trends.

Demographics

Between the 29th of June and the 2nd of July 2010 474 members of the CLUB BBQ free email forwarding service completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 54.6% of the sample were male, 27.4% in their twenties, 34.2% in their thirties, and 38.4% in their forties.

I feel that the CLUB BBQ demographic tends to be more technical than the average user, and that is perhaps reflected in the choice of search engine in Q1SQ3 where Google beats Yahoo! by a factor of three to one, despite other surveys with a wider demographic spread indicating that Yahoo! is a few points ahead of Google.

I use Opera and use its built-in toolbar to search Google. I’ve heard from a few people that Bing is actually worthwhile trying out, but when I’ve tried it out it very cleary biases my search towards Japan-located and Japanese-language results and I don’t know how to tell it to take a more global view.
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