世論 What Japan Thinks

About the only radio I hear is when I visit the union shop at work and they have a radio playing in the background, but all the English radio idents grate on me! To find out about the habits of the average person, JR Tokai Express Research Inc performed a survey, reported on by japan.internet.com, into radio.

Demographics

Between the 8th and 10th of April 2008 330 members of the JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.3% of the sample was female, 2.4% were in their teens, 17.0% in their twenties, 38.2% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 7.9% in their fifties, 6.7% in their sixties, and 0.6% aged seventy or older.

Note that digital radio started broadcasting on the 1st of December 2006. I’ve never listened to it, unless hire cars have had it, but even then it would never have been more than 20 seconds I listened for. In addition, since I almost never listen to the radio, I can’t recall ever hearing a URL or an email address on an advertisement.
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The battle for new customers amongst the mobile carriers is rather intense, with the three main players running lots of prime-time television advertising. To see what effect they are having on the average Japanese consumer, NEPRO Japan recently looked at mobile phone television advertisements.

Research results

From 10 am on the 7th to 3 am on the 8th of March 2008 4,498 users of the mobile phone menuing systems from the three main providers, namely iMode, Yahoo! Keitai and EZweb self-selected themselves to complete an open survey. 56% of the sample was female, 3% in their teens, 35% in their twenties, 42% in their thirties, and 20% aged forty or older.

Sadly, if the result in Q4 had been the other way round I could have got the much more enticing title of “Yukie Nakama gets licked by dog”, but it was not to be. Anyway, here is the lovely Yukie Nakama, and some other not-so-lovely people:

SoftBank CM from YouTube

Although I can’t stand dogs in real life, I really do like the SoftBank commercials! Yukie Namaka’s au “Anybody!” appearances are rather entertaining too, although the latest ones are a bit naff. I can’t remember recent DoCoMo adverts, although a few months ago they had celebrity-infested ones. Just to round out, eMobile has monkeys, with this one featuring the SoftBank dog’s twin brother being amazed at the cheap deals.
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You may have noticed that my sidebar has changed - I’ve ditched BlogAds which was just not performing for me at all, and also killed a Google skyscraper that was suffering from Google’s squeeze on the little guys, and I’ve instead joined up with AdToll to provide advertising services. I currently have available two slots; one of size 125 x 125 above the fold (usually), and one at 468 x 60 at the bottom of each post, available at a quite reasonable cost - at the moment it’s standing at about 40 cents for a projected 15,000 impressions. Please consult my rate card below for the latest prices.

In addition, my fellow blog publishers may like to take advantage of AdToll’s services, with a key feature being a modest 30% cut compared to many other advertisement brokers who charge a 50% premium for their services. If so, please click here to sign up.

japan.internet.com today reported on the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research on the subject of search engines and advertising keywords. They interviewed 1,099 ordinary members of their monitor group by means of a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.8% of the sample was male, 24.9% in their twenties, 21.6% in their thirties, 22.2% in their forties, 20.6% in their fifties, and 10.7% in their sixties. This article is only a excerpt from their full report, which seems to have lots more relevant statistics regarding this subject.

I’m very curious to know whether search keywords are used as heavily in other countries. The majority of television adverts seem to have keywords, often with no URL, greatly outnumbering those with only URLs. I also wonder if any of these Japanese advertising search terms have been usurped by googlebombing, as they do seem ripe for targeting.

Interestingly enough, the page on “Google bombing” in Wikipedia is translated into 17 other languages, but Japanese is conspicuous by its absence. Googlebombing (Google 爆撃, bakugeki) only appears once in Japanese Wikipedia in the middle of another page discussing SEO techniques. Surely there must be some well-known Japanese Googlebombs, or even Yahoobombs, since that engine is the winner in Q1?
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Last month japan.internet.com reported on an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into mobile phones and promotional sites. 1,049 members of goo Research’s monitor pool responded to a private internet-based questionnaire. 58.5% of the sample was female, 1.7% in their teens, 24.4% in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 25.0% in their forties, and 7.9% in their fifties.
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Central Research Services Inc recently reported on a survey into media consumption in 2005. The survey itself was conducted back in October 2005, and although detailed demographics are not available, the sample was randomly selected from residents up and down the country aged between 15 and 69, and conducted by means of face-to-face interviews. The response rate was 57.4%, giving a raw sample size of 3,443 people.

I don’t think this survey teaches us much that intuition suggests to be true, but it’s always interesting to get these hunches backed up by raw data. However, although almost three-quarters read a paper every day, how much they actually read versus just headline skimming is another question that hasn’t been asked here.

Q3 is a rather weird question - perhaps it’s to see if people start with the news or the sports. The tabloids have sports on the back page, but the broadsheets usually have the television listings, then the sports from the second-last page, so I don’t know how that affected the answers.
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of an opinion poll conducted by goo Research into search keywords in television advertising. At the end of September 1,088 people from thier monitor group successfully completed a web-based private questionnaire. Demographically, 58.1% were female, 21.8% in their twenties, 43.7% in their thirties, 24.0% in their forties, and 10.6% in their fifties.

Recently, Japanese television advertisements (and some print advertisements too) have tended to use instead of URLs a search keyword. Sometimes there are unique, made-up keywords, such as ウサタク, usataku, which, if fed into Google, matches the expected page. Others, however, have much more generic terms, even just HIS, but which, at the time of writing anyway, also works in Google. This seems like they would be a great target for googlebombing, but this seems not to have happened, which does seem a bit odd to me.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, published the results of the 9th regular monthly survey on RSS usage. 1,013 members of the goo Research monitor group from all over Japan replied to the private internet-based survey. 56.2% of the sample was female, 2.5% were teenagers, 22.4% in their twenties, 40.6% in their thirties, 23.6% in their forties, 8.3% in their fifties, and 2.7% aged sixty or over.

I can’t say I’ve ever spotted an RSS feed with adverts in it, even though there is a Google program for AdSense for this, and there is another service whose name escapes me right now that offers a similar service. As for visiting sites with feeds, I only do so if I feel the need to comment on a post or look at who might have commented on it. Looking at my log files, I can tell from my LiveJournal feed that just 5% of the readers actually visit my site!
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