Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea was the sweetest film I’ve seen since My Neighbour Totoro, and over 8 million Japanese seem to agree with that sentiment. The official Ponyo site itself has racked up just under a million visitors, 995,000 to be precise, (low in my view) from home computers in July, the highest ever figures for the film maker Ghibli’s properties, with the main ages of the visitors being 34% in their thirties and 29% in their forties. By sex, 57% were female. Previous records were 701,000 in November of 2004 for Howl’s Moving Castle, and 444,000 in July of 2006 for Tales of Earthsea.
For all of the Ghibili sites visitors jumped from 114,000 in June to 1,123,000 in July.
For box office sales, number one for the first half of the year was 相棒, aibou, with 311,000 predominantly male viewers in May alone, with over half of the total being over forty years old. In July, the top movie was Hana Yori Dango (Boys before Flowers) with 576,000 ticket sales, 85% of them to females, and 38% of the viewers 19 years old or younger.
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.
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