Mozilla in Asia

Shin from from the inside, looking in points us to a recent survey by NetRatings Japan which shows that despite growth by Google in Japan, Yahoo! Japan clearly holds the mainstream of the market in Japan. I hope Shin doesn’t mind if I copy his whole post, because it’s succinct and each sentence has critical information about the mainstream of the Japanese Internet.

Netratings have published Japan PV and user numbers for May 2007, and Yahoo! Japan again comes top with 31.8B pageviews/month. Yahoo! Japan has retained the top spot for 85 months, since the first Japanese statistics were compiled in April 2000.

Uniques for Yahoo! Japan have surpassed 40 million for the first time ever, and reach is estimated at a staggering 88%.

y/y growth provides solace for Google, which is up 58% which appears to be poised to rise to #2 web property in Japan imminently. Google is currently behind Rakuten (25.8M users), NTT Communications(24.5M) and Microsoft(24.3M) at 23.8M users, but competitors are showing negligible growth (2~3% y/y) or in the case of Microsoft, a decline (-6%y/y). The domestic total internet user base grew 8% last year, so the #2~4 players’ reach has actually declined. Yahoo! Japan showed 10% growth in y/y user numbers.

Yahoo! Japan’s 31.8B pv/mth figure puts it (just) ahead of the most viewed site in the US, which is the original Yahoo! at 31.6B pv/mth. When you consider that Y! Japan, because of the Japanese language nature draws its user base almost exclusively from the Japanese internet population which is approximately 1/3 that of the US, and Yahoo! US has greater overseas exposure on top of its larger domestic base because its content is in English, the lingua franca of the global internet, the page view numbers are even more impressive.

Yahoo! Japan is now distributing Firefox with the Yahoo! Japan toolbar, (Yahoo! Japan has been distributing Firefox for some time but only recently with their toolbar.)  The dominance of Yahoo! Japan in Japan is a great example of how markets in Asia are quite distinct.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Firefox, Japan, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.