The Japanese web market is just too big to be shrugged off: The country boasts one of the highest Internet penetrations worldwide (74%, compared to 70% in the USA), a $5.7 billion online advertising market (out if one estimated to be worth $45 billion globally) and is ranked No. 3 in terms of total web population (94 million, about as many as Germany and the UK combined).

So how does Google challenge Yahoo’s position as the hub of the Japanese Internet?

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Analytics provider comScore is out with a new report today regarding the Japanese Web social networking market. Facebook has the largest percentage growth (213%) over the period June 2007-June 2008. Mixi.jp leads the Japanese social networking category with over 12 million monthly uniques while Facebook has grown to just over 500k visitors a month. It’s important to note that this comScore report does not include mobile social networking usage. This would be a very interesting bit of analysis since mobile usage is so high in Japan.

MySpace is second with 10% of the traffic Mixi.jp has but doubles Facebook in unique visitors. While we here in the states seem to believe Orkut is dead, it’s beating Facebook in unique visitors by 20% for June 2008. comScore also notes that Orkut users have the heaviest engagement noting, "…in this study across several measures, including average usage days per visitor (11.5), average minutes per visitor (454), and average pages per visitor (1,557). Mixi.jp also generates fairly heavy engagement, while Facebook.com and MySpace.com show more modest engagement thus far."

AdCamo, the service for advertising in the background of web pages, is re-launching today as a platform for web sites and ad networks that want to offer the format to their clients. For publishers, this means if you want to sell background advertising, you can use AdCamo to manage campaigns and serve inventory. For ad networks and agencies, there is an API so the AdCamo platform can be integrated into your own systems and software.

The backbone of this strategy is something that AdCamo calls the Platform Management Interface, which features many of the same tools you’d expect in an ad platform, but designed specifically for the background ad format. You can create new campaigns, track impressions and clicks, and view details on a unique metric for the format called Time Before Click (TBC) that lets you see how long it takes someone to click on the background ad.

Of course, the big question about background ads is whether or not websites will adopt them because of the obvious aesthetic issue. As I noted in my earlier review of AdCamo, the format is often used by MySpace, but hasn’t seen massive adoption by the small-to-midsize publishers that AdCamo would seem to be targeting with its new strategy. To try and address this, AdCamo is offering 3 different ad formats that publishers can use: Tiled, Projection, and Pillar.

And, these formats actually seem pretty flexible. While the “Tiled” format (the same image repeated over and over) is perhaps a bit obnoxious, Projection and Pillar are neat because the background isn’t actually a glaring ad, but rather imagery that compliments traditional banner advertising placed elsewhere on the page. My favorite is this sample coffee ad, where the background is coffee beans, with a banner ad for them in the middle of the page:

In short, if background advertising takes off, AdCamo is well positioned to be the platform for managing it. Becoming a platform as opposed to an ad network is a smart strategy for driving adoption, as it means the company can focus on the technology while allowing firms with existing clients to do the selling. Will publishers bite? As always, it comes down to whether or not advertisers are willing to spend enough on the unproven ad format to make publishers sacrifice the aesthetics of a clean web page background. For its part, AdCamo says that it already has several large publishers using the service and ad agency alliances locked up, but declined to cite any names at this point.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:AdCamo Monetizes Web Page BackgroundsAOL’s Platform-A Expands to EuropeMaven’s Internet TV Network Offers Unique Ad PlatformAOL Acquires Third Screen Media, Broadening Mobile Ad PlatformsMashMeet LA 2.0: Final Recap, Pictures, Video, and ThanksPushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?DoubleClick to Serve Silverlight Ads — Microsoft Looks Foolish Again

Source:Mashable!

Facebook may be the de facto leader in the United States, but in Japan (and other areas across the globe) it has some significant work to do if it wants to catch up to the local social network flavors.

But according to comScore, it’s doing just that.  Over the past year, Facebook’s growth has tripled and it’s quickly gaining ground on Japan’s top social network, Mixi.JP.  In fact, Facebook grew an astounding 213 percent over the past year, while Mixi grew by just 3 percent and MySpace inched forward just 10 percent.

That said, Facebook is still way behind Mixi and other social networks in Japan.  During the last year, 12 million visitors used Mixi, while just 172,000 visited Facebook.

Regardless, Facebook’s astounding growth in Japan and other places across the globe underscore an interesting development in the company’s next phase of growth: for quite a while, it was a US social network, but as it continues to improve its services and use its localization efforts, it’s quickly realizing that Facebook will appeal to people all over the globe.

And in the process, I wonder if Facebook can be the first major social network to break out of the walled-garden mentality that has developed in the space and become the leading social network both domestically and abroad.

As it stands, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, Mixi, and countless other social networks reign supreme in certain countries throughout the world.  But as Facebook’s popularity grows all over the world – it currently does best in the US, Canada, and South Africa – it’s slowly but surely bucking that trend.

For years, we’ve listened to countless social networks claim that they have what it takes to be the world’s supreme social network that people from anywhere would love and enjoy.  But so far, not one company has been able to deliver.

But as we consider the growth Facebook is enjoying and delve a bit deeper into its performance across the globe, we quickly find that its localization service has worked extremely well and it’s quickly becoming a major player in many of the major foreign markets.  That doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to control those markets and it doesn’t even mean that it will win out.  But it does mean that Facebook is the first social network in recent memory to fully grasp a presence in more countries than its own.

And that, for sure, is an important first step in taking a more global role.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Twitter in Japanese, If You PleaseCould Yahoo “Keep Things In the Family” By Selling to Yahoo Japan?MySpace Japan ComingZooomr Launches Mobile Features and Opens Japan OfficeYouTube Concedes To Japanese DemandsThinkFree Signs Deal with Sourcenext to Enter Japanese MarketDIY Ad Network Partners with Technorati Japan

Sized at an estimated $5.6 billion in 2007, Japan boasts one of the biggest online advertising markets in the world – a huge potential just waiting to be tapped by foreign social networks. The world’s two largest social networks, MySpace and Facebook, barely register in Japan. As the Google Trends for Websites chart above shows, […]

Martyn Williams has an interesting look at the Japanese mobile content market. He notes that for the calendar year 2007, more than $100 billion was spent on mobile content. The total was actually $107.5 billion and includes items such as ring tones, Web site subscriptions and e-commerce purchases. E-commerce made up about 65% of the total amount spent and all sorts of transactions were handled including: movie and event ticket sales, travel reservations, air and rail ticket sales, stock trading and online auctions.

The biggest percentage gain came from "high-fidelity music" which increased 42% thanks to more mobile devices handling better quality sound. Mobile gaming jumped 13% as well.

Maybe the iPhone app store will push other countries to follow suit. While not mentioned in the article, I wonder what percentage of transactions took place via a QR code.

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