世論 What Japan Thinks

[part 1] [part 2] [part 3]

This extremely detailed survey from goo Research in conjunction with the NTT DATA Institute of Management Consulting, Inc looked at old people and computer and internet usage, and comparing these habits with that of younger people.

Demographics

Between the 12th and 16th of September 2008 1,064 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 67.5% of the sample were male, 0.9% in their teens, 7.0% in their twenties, 17.4% in their thirties, 12.5% in their forties, 6.0% in their fifties, and 56.1% aged sixty or older. Note that everyone in the sample had access to a computer and has signed up to goo Research as a monitor, so please be aware of that before extrapolating the behaviour observed here to the general population of Japan.

The literacy levels here are high, but as cautioned above one is dealing with a more computer-aware population.

Q2 is curious in that people want most to learn how to install new hardware. It would be interesting to find out if it’s for the curiousity value of opening the box and poking around, in order to save expensive upgrade fees from a third party, or to just connect a new printer or camera without requiring an on-site visit.

Q4, Q5 and Q6 show a very distinct and interesting split between the sexes.
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I don’t really know what to make of the headline, but it was an interesting result that came out of a recent survey by goo Research, reported on by japan.internet.com, into internet advertising, the second regular monthly survey into this topic.

Demographics

Between the 22nd and 25th of December 2008 1,082 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.1% of the sample were male, 16.4% in their teens, 17.8% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.1% in their forties, and 28,2% aged fifty or older.

Comparing Q2 with the results of the first regular internet advertising survey, I see that contextual search ads are perceived as marginally more useful than contextual contents ads, which is interesting. In addition, it appears people are more aware of contextual search ads according to the last survey compared to content-based contextual ads in this survey.
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Here’s one of these surveys which teaches me something new about Japan; this time it was a survey from Research Plus, reported on by japan.internet.com, into selling medical goods over the internet.

Demographics

On the 5th of December 2008 300 members of the Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, 16.3% in their twenties, 38.0% in their thirties, 29.7% in their forties, 13.3% in their fifties, and 2.7% in their sixties.

In September of this year it was decided that from 2009 it will be possible to buy over the internet such over-the-counter medicines as anti-flatulence pills and vitamins, but as can be seen in Q2SQ, a lot of other seemingly innocent drugs are still not sellable.
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Yahoo! JAPAN recently annouced the results of a number of their “Best of 2008″, and one of the categories was what rare products people just couldn’t resist click through to. Voting was (as far as I understand) open to all registered users of Yahoo! JAPAN. The items were collected from all the Hot Items selected by Yahoo! Shopping between January and October of this year.

If you do like the look of Marimokkori, you can in fact buy him here.
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With so many free web-based mail services on offer, a surprising result from a survey conducted by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into web email was that a number of people do actually pay for it.

Demographics

Between the 29th of November and the 2nd of December 2008 300 people from the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% were in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Unfortunately, this survey did not report what sort of services people were paying for, although perhaps if you paid Marsh some money they’d tell you. I suppose I could say that I pay for two web mail services; one through this web site hosting as I do use the web mail reading facility, and the other is PoBox.com that I use for mail forwarding my private email, although I don’t use their web mail, which is an additional charge.
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As a professional blogger (perhaps) my requirements for a blogging service are very different from the average person, so I do find it a little hard to relate to this survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by Marsh Inc into blogging.

Demographics

Between the 18th and 21st of November 2008 300 members of the Marsh monitor panel completed an internet-based questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 by sex, and 20.0% were in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

In Q1 I think the amount of people reading commercial blogs is rather low, but I suspect it might be that because people are not seeing the URL as megacorp.com/blog, they assume that places are just hobby blogs, not commercial enterprises.

Most of the Japanese blogs, particularly the personal blogs, make Facebook look tasteful.
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Since I started running an ad blocker (Ad Muncher), I don’t see any advertisements in search results. However, the use of such software was not investigated in this recent survey published on japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research into the topic of internet advertising. This is the first in a regular (monthly, presumably) series.

Demographics

Between the 17th and 20th of November 2008 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sampe were male, 16.7% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.0% in their forties, and 27.8% aged fifty or older.

Note that this report concentrated on search results advertising, but the full survey covered many more kinds of internet advertising.

As you might have noticed, I’ve started with contextual advertisements in my RSS feed. Perhaps next month’s survey might cover them, but given the low figures for RSS usage, I don’t hold out much hope!
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I remember last time I was looking for an electronic book survey two came along at once, and this time too I have seen a couple in quick succession, so I’ll again double them up. Both surveys were reported on by japan.internet.com, and the first was on electronic books and conducted by iBridge Research Plus, and the second on book purchasing online and conducted by Marsh Inc.

Demographics

For the iBridge survey, between the 30th of October and the 1st of November 2008 300 members of the iBridge monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.3% of the sample were female, 16.0% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 11.3% in their fifties, and 5.7% aged sixty or older. For the Marsh survey, between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2008 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

In Q2 from iBridge, 青空文庫, Aozora Bunko, Blue Sky Library, is a great place to find stuff to read, although the formatting could do with some work to be more friendly to modern browsers that can display readings of kanji over the characters rather than inline after them. However, this is a list of viewers for Aozora Bunko. The last book I read from there was Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is a nice short story for intermediate-level students. I also don’t understand why they restricted the question to PC users, since as can be seen from the viewer page, there are suitable readers for almost everything including an iPhone. Do any of my iPhone using readers want to do a road test of these packages?
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I haven’t looked at Social Networking Services (SNS) for a while, so I was pleased to find this one to report, published on japan.internet.com and conducted by another newcomer to me, Point On Research, on mobile SNS.

Demographics

On the 16th of November 2008 exactly 1,000 mobile phone users completed a survey. It does not say whether or not the survey was conducted via mobile phone or computer-based internet, as a mobile phone base would imply a higher percentage of people on all-you-can-eat data plans, so these sort of people tend to be more active online. The sample was exactly 50:50 male and female, and 20:20:20:20:20 of people in their teens, twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties.

Note that although most people use a cut-down browser on their mobile phones, all the major PC-sites have tailored their interfaces to fit these restrictions. Having said that, most of the top sites in Q1 are mobile-only free game-centred SNSes.
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Censorship is always a hot topic in discussions regarding the internet, with recent flare-ups surrounding such matters as the government trying to remove web sites promoting suicide by sulfide gas (although Bloomberg reported how to do it), so I was pleased to see the issue being tackled by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com in this survey on web censorship.

Research results

Between the 12th and 14th of November 2008 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were female, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

I am certainly not for government-level censorship of either domestic or foreign web content, but I do support properly-executed legal orders for domestic sites to remove content, and of course self-regulation by service providers. The web should be neither a free-for-all or a free-for-none, but instead a healthy balance must be reached. In Q2, I think they must mean within Japan, as The Great Firewall of China is a fact.

For those curious about the Japanese language used in the original survey, I translated 検閲, ken-etsu, as censorship, and 規制, kisei, as regulation.
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