世論 What Japan Thinks

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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Since this blog, like many others, and like real life too, is littered with adverts, it might be useful to look at how the Japanese perceive advertising. This survey from goo Research attempted to address this issue. This survey was carried out amongst 2,147 people residing in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures of Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba. It was performed as a real time survey using mobile phones, whatever that means. I think it means they just phoned mobile numbers from their survey group at random, so people could answer about their current surroundings.
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