Japan SEM

This is a video I took while riding the subway here in Tokyo. It shows the use of suggested search in advertisements. Since Japanese in Japan don’t type in URLs because of high chance of mispelling it, or just can’t remember it advertisers came up with the solution of putting native Japanese suggested search in ads. It actually seems to be working because pro marketers I know say that since it’s in Japanese people are actually remembering the phrases & searching for them.

The next step of course is domains in native Japanese.

Baidu the Chinese engine has launched it’s Japanese search engine at Baidu.jp. The Baidu engine is currently without ads but I’m sure that won’t last for long. I have a feeling that Baidu is going to cut more into Google’s share of the Japanese market than Yahoo’s. Yahoo! Japan has the lead in Japan for search use.

Paypal which was Japan compatible for a few years now finally did a move to try to get Japanese people to actually use the service. They put it in Japanese finally. Even though there is a huge misconception that English is the international language of the internet you’ll find out how quick that concept flies when nobody in the country knows about your service.

Hopefully this will spurr young folk to try their hand at eccomerce. There are so many young people with various ideas & doing online transactions in Japan is not an easy task. So good luck Paypal 頑張って下さい。。