Japan’s biggest social network is called Mixi, launched in February 2004 by the company of the same name. Drawing in one in five web users in the country, Mixi now boasts over 15 million members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and racks up over 14 billion page views monthly. Google Trends for Websites shows the Japan-focused service attracts more visitors than Bebo on a worldwide basis (about 2.3 million daily, see chart below).
Compared to leading Western social networks, Mixi is rather scarce function-wise (see the screenshot below). However, here are the main country-specific differences why MySpace, Facebook or Bebo don’t stand a chance in Japan:
- Restricted membership to increase the level of safety: Officially, every member must be over 18 years old. Mixi also requires an invitation from a current user and a Japanese mobile mail address to register.
- Blogging and communication as the big ideas: Next to resyndicating external blogs, members excessively write and share so-called “diaries” on the site. Instead of focusing on messaging, status updates and news feeds, Mixi established itself as one of Japan’s biggest blogging platforms. The site also offers more than 2.5 million user-generated bulletin boards.
- Marginal approach to design and structure: It’s almost impossible for users to change the layout and look of the site, which is only available in Japanese. External applications are not allowed. One of Mixi’s most striking characteristics is the scantiness regarding functions and features.
- High level of anonymity: Mixi abides by the preference of Japanese people to generally stay totally anonymous online. The number of members using real names and photos is below 5%. Very important for Japanese users: The so-called ashi ato (footprint) function makes it possible to retrace every visitor on profile pages, improving the feeling of personal security.
- Tailor-made mobile version: Users accessing Mixi’s mobile version have been clearly outnumbering those going through PCs since July 2007 (ratio of pageviews in March 2008: 60% mobile to 40% PC).
Another point making Mixi stand out is that the service generates relatively robust revenues. As the world’s first Web 2.0 company, Mixi went IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in September 2006. Market capitalization currently stands at $970 million, bringing the company close to LinkedIn’s $1 billion value.
Mixi Inc. operates a profitable online employment site called Find Job!, mainly for IT-related job openings. For the fiscal year ending March 2008, sales on Mixi ballooned from $36.5 million to $82.4 million on a year on year basis. Find Job! alone contributed another $11.6 million. Net profits for the company as a whole grew 79.9% to $19 million in the same time frame.
While userbase and financial data don’t stack up against leading Western social networks in absolute terms, Mixi’s performance is still impressive given they operate in Japan only. Revenue per member stands at $5,46 for Mixi, which is 13 times more than Bebo ($20 million) and 3 times more than Facebook ($150 million). Including Find Job!’s contribution, Mixi also dwarfs Bebo in profits per member ($1.26 versus $0,1 for each of Bebo’s 50 million users). Based on the average Internet advertising spend per person, Mixi ranks 8th in the Techcrunch ranking of the real value of social networks.
The position as a quasi-monopolist is based on a horizontally and (to a lower level) vertically diversified business model.
Users can opt for premium membership ($3 month per month, i.e. to get additional storage space), generating revenues which account for 7% of the total sales.
The lion’s share of revenues comes from other sources. Based on a audio player plugin, users can share and buy every song listed in Mixi’s music section via iTunes or are directed to online retailers to order the CD. In addition, “Mixi Radio” was launched this month, a music streaming service that is partly fee-based.
Users have also contributed tens of thousands of reviews on books, CDs, DVDs etc. in Mixi’s “Reviews” section. Each of these articles contains affiliate links to online shops.
The site makes additional money with traffic referral to Yahoo! Japan search and targeted display and text ads. Mixi is also frequently collaborating with Japanese companies, which run promotion campaigns on the site.
MySpace (Alexa Japan’s No. 81) and Facebook (not in the Top 100) are trailing in Mixi’s home market, even though they established translated – yet not localized – versions in November 2006 and May 2008, respectively. On the other hand, Mixi’s price for success is that it’s Japan-focused approach to design and funcionality renders scaling on an international level next to impossible. The company recently expanded to neighboring China but in its current form, Mixi might be better off continuing to skim the Japanese market
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Not only is the mobile phone email address required, you also (as of about a year ago) have to supply a mobile phone number valid in Japan. This was mainly put in to stop the practice of creating spamming accounts or multiple accounts for one person.
I got my mixi account this year and did not have to supply a Japanese mobile email or phone number. I did need to get invited.
I have to say that the community appears friendlier and a lot more active than it’s American/international counterparts.
Hi!!!
I really want to join this network because I look forward to learn japanese this summer. Please could you send me an invitation, it would be very nice of you.
@BetterThanTC … Mixi just wouldn’t appeal to a western audience … it has a cluttered interface and is a bit light on features (as Serkan mentioned). The best features are to do with mobile usage, which is where some lessons can be learned, but not enough to make it a success in the West.
The biggest reason for Mixi’s success is first to market status. Japanese people are not so quick to switch. When they do though, they will all do so at once.
If western audiences don’t like cluttered interfaces then how do you explain the success of the mess called myspace? Even with the vanilla layout it’s a disaster. With regard to the features, as 37signals and others will tell you, sometimes less is more. I find mixi has everything I need, other than a good shared-calendar feature.
Actually Mixi is not the first major SNS in japan; it was Gree.
We (I’m Japanese) feel Mixi’s interface is not cluttered at all or even better than FB.
One of many reasons of the success can be attributed to the the fact that they targeted, at least at first, young females. That’s why the design and functions are “simple.”
I don’t find the UI cluttered either, especially with the design modifications last month.
I find that Mixi compares somewhat to Multiply, which is doing just fine in the US, thank you very much.
I agree, this wouldn’t work in the west. Around here, people are madly looking for way to monetize social networks, but a closed walled-garden is not the way to go.
Gmail started as invitation only.
always interesting to see the success sites on that side of the world.
Japanese today like to share among themselves, but not with non-Japanese - at least that’s the impression i got from web2expo tokyo last nov 2007…. definitely a “cultural divide” (BetterThanTC)!
At population of 120+ million people in Japan or 12+ million in Tokyo metropolis alone, Japanese ppl don’t seem to need to interact much, directly, with people of other languages and/or cultures — at least while they are in Japan. More time are better spent on their gadgets (mobile phone for almost everyone, I think - and they use them a lot — in trains, while walking etc.), misc. electronics/robots, games and porn (for guys i think), leaving much less time for Web surfing/participation (key for 2.0 activities in USA for instance).
After all, being disconnected with others will preserve their culture for many decades/centuries in the future - LANGUAGE and FASHION etc. - they have their own taste for creative activities. We even have awesome Bon Odori (classic Japanese fashion & music) festival here in Penang, some thousands of miles away from the ISLANDs of Japan.
While American formula for market reachout seems to be around 50% USA, and 50% elsewhere (world), Japan’s formula all these decades seem to be around 95% Japan, 5% elsewhere (OR VISE VERSA for their foreign-based business operation).
Imagine having 3000+ ppl including 100s of international delegates congregating for (a supposedly “International”) Web 2.0 Expo (with Tim O’Reilly, Joi Ito and Evan Williams as the key personalities speaking English during their keynote sessions), but almost all presentation materials for conferences and exhibition were prepared in 90+% Japanese! And to make things worse, most of the booth attendants can’t even speak English at all — very few that could, but you could hardly understand them.
You’d see huge difference in terms of shared materials made available online for two events running during close times: Web2Expo Berlin and Web2Expo Tokyo to see what I meant. 100s of slides & videos, 1000s of photos, tons of conversation everywhere for Berlin (in English, instead of in German), but almost ZERO for/off Tokyo’s!! Just try to google them… They didn’t even provide us with a proper event (printed/printable) guidebook before or while we were there.
All we international delegates got from Shibuya was photocopied slide printouts, which were mostly Japanese… (can only understand those with charts/graphics).
My advise for Americans expanding their 2.0 empire to Asia: Look elsewhere besides Japan - think China, India and South East Asia (80% Friendster’s audience for instance just in the Philipines, Malaysia, Singapore & Indonesia). And Vietnam is another emerging Asian IT economy. Japan on the other hand has got their own thing, and they’re covered pretty well.
Obviously Japan is not the center of Asia, and will continue to be on its own now that ppl everywhere would rather rely on the Web for knowledge instead of technologies brought to us directly from Toyota, Mitsubishi, Honda, Nissan, Fuji, Sony, Panasonic etc. (when was the last time you relied on Japanese technology for your Web 2.0 needs? - Think Nokia, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Aztech, Dell etc — none of these come from Japan).
Continuing on Evan Williams (@ev - two of his products will be discussed here), things in Asia are quite different than in North America, Europe or Australia/NZ - Consider that Twitter (or microblogging) is already huge in those places (including in Japan - they are always early, and sometimes faster than Americans for tech stuff), BUT Twitter, FF, Jaiku etc are almost unheard of in Malaysia with the number of Malaysians who tweets at around 2000 (likely bringing less than 0.2% traffic to Twitter.com despite having more than 14 million Internet users ~ 3-4x more than net users in New Zealand — where Twitter is traffic-ranked #661 by Alexa) or well under 10K for all microblogging platforms. Malaysia-based Pacmee however (a real Twitter on steroid (disregard “pownce” for a while), combining SMS with Web interface) seems to get more acceptance for the locals due to high cost for GPRS/3G and much lower broadband penetration in the country.
The same goes for Ebay and Monster.com (two US giants for auction and job-market respectively) where Malaysia-based Lelong and Jobstreet thrive more all these years, making the former two hardly visible for most Internet users in Malaysia. “First to Market” (Mike Sheetal) counts for this I suppose, just like for Mixi in Japan as well as Friendster where about four millions Malaysians put up their profiles on that platform, while much less than 400K (less than 10% vs. Friendster) are on Facebook. After all, Friendster is aggressively introducing multi-lingual support including Bahasa Melayu (official language in Malaysia) and Chinese (~35% of Malaysia’s population) and SMS (mobile texting) has been promised for launching soon… — Facebook on the other hand seems to be stuck with English-only instructions and no words on SMS support outside of USA.
For now, Malay archipelagos (Malaysia-Indonesia and Singapore) seem to focus more on (non-micro) blogging to earn as much income as possible from Google Adsense (huge commissions payer, and very friendly to Asian countries with decent local language support), and to join in the social-political ruckus for media freedom — just see how these countries fare for Blogger.com or Wordpress.com country-based traffic ranking !
{HINT: higher than USA!}
hayırlı olsun Serkan.
NaS - Japanese are reserved, have more humility than most other cultures, are extremely well read, and generally go through a rigorous education system that allows them to tell dummies from non-dummies. They also have thousands of years of culture and extremely low crime both of which they can be proud of in this time and age. As has been the case for thousands of years, people in Japan, especially trade show booth babes who have never been outside Japan, are likely to be unable to relate too well to foreigners, even if you speak Japanese. So, rather than cast Japan in light of all the other asian countries, you best give Japan credit for what they have accomplished, including the longest lifespans in the world and probably the highest savings rates too. These people have much greater discipline than any you refer to in the west, and there isn’t one asian country that doesn’t envy Japan’s economic progress and leadership. Only Korea compares somewhat to the success of Japan. Singapore, Taiwan and others, are minute by comparison to Japan’s economy and technology. Finally, remember that Japan has excellent health care for all, and that there is a very small disparity between what CEO’s make and what the average worker makes in Japan. That cannot be said in the USA whatsoever.
Let me finally say, if you go to a trade show in the USA, would you expect anyone to speak Japanese? No, because the customers here are not going to be Japanese. So why would you expect Web 2.0 Japan to be filled with English speakers? Japanese people don’t want, need, or enjoy that. Just like the Japanese language is hard for Americans, English is hard for Japanese. Just because other asian countries have no choice to speak in English to foreigners, doesn’t mean that would apply to the Japanese. They have some economic power of their own, I think people might agree.
From the way it looks, its exclusive for Japanese only.
What is with all this stereotyping of who the Japanese are and why they might use a site like Mixi? Would anyone dare to make such wild generalizations about those in their own country? Silly, silly. Unless you REALLY know something about something as complex as someone else’s culture, I’d advise keeping your pet theories to yourself. Having read a few books and/or hung out in Roppongi for a couple months are hardly enough to speak cogently on the subject. But, if you insist on being an ass…by all means keep talking out of yours.
I’ve had an account on Mixi since 2004 - before the mobile restriction was put in place. It does have a much different flavor than sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, etc. Personally, I’d have to agree that most of its success stem from its first mover advantage and consistent adaptation to key local needs like the mobile feature set. There are a number of other extremely minimalist community sites out there in addition to Mixi however - chiefly 2ch and Mobage. It is the mobile angle driving the UI in these cases as well…not some desire for Zen-inspired minimalism.
I don’t hold out much hope for Mixi in China. No way they beat out established players like QQ and 51.
While I agree much of what OmaeBaka says here, I only wish he/she had chosen other username. Indeed, “Japanese today like to share among themselves, but not with non-Japanese” as NaS said above. *sigh*
@Pixie Little: I agree about their ‘bests of bests’ especially their work discipline (respecting people included when it’s part of their work).. ie. the authority ppl who checked for our passport while on the bus before entering Narita was the most courteous I’ve ever encountered among all other workers at airports. Door greetings etc at the hotels and venue were excellent too.
Though, all we can have from these ‘greatness of Japan’ are for us to be envious of them, and learn from observation - instead of trying to learn much from these great individuals directly.
C’mon guys, we’re talking about ‘Web 2.0′ not People/Human 2.0 - so I’d focus less on face-to-face encounter analysis but the web sharing part. Shouldn’t the materials collected be shared online, with translations to major languages (especially English?) so the rest of the world can learn from each other’s culture? Even if not the textual content, the photos/videos?? Why almost none?
Unless if we’re going to go back to INTRANET vs. INTERNET.
See here to see what I meant:
http://tokyo.web2expo.com/2007photos/index.html
ZERO PHOTOS?
And
http://www.cmptech.jp/web2expo.....index.html
NO (PDF) DOWNLOADS?
We’ve even emailed the organizer (CMP Japan) but they just won’t email us anything (like the guidebook) before/during the event, saying “Nada!”…
@OmaeBaka - I agree… Baidu, QQ & Sina seem so strong already.
NaS - I’ll only say that I put in about 2 years in Japan and took quite a bit of time to be able to speak Japanese in social contexts, not for business, because business that’s a lot more complicated. In any case, I think in order to succeed in Japan, it’s not like the past. A foreigner in Japan who wants to do business there today must communicate on their terms, reading and speaking Japanese. Japan is about the size of California with 4 times the population. However, unlike the USA where relationships are often fleeting, people in Japan tend to know a lot about their acquaintances, even to the distinct uneasyness with this scrutiny by the Japanese upon the Japanese themselves. In short, it’s a long haul. If you think the system is going to be easy for anyone, ask the Japanese themselves. They will be the first to admit it’s insular and difficult to navigate — even for them. Get used to it, I guess.
Quality over headcount is a way of success?
I have to say, the first two comment posts written by Nas were better than the TechCrunch post itself. Might be time to hire a commenter over your new writer.
Our job site http://www.leapways.com is offering completely free service mainly for startup companies. Apart from simple job posting, we have end-to-end hiring solutions. For more info contact us at info@leapways.com.
So… basically, what this article is saying is that since there is no Western cross market for Web 2.0 Japan, TechCrunch really doesn’t need a Japan based Web 2.0 reporter, right?
does anyone actually give a shit about these social networking sites other than investors?
Mixi also has an interesting and innovative architecture. If you are interested take a look at http://highscalability.com/mixi-jp-architecture.
Terkan / other TC editor: not sure if it’s a typo, but you appear to be using ‘,’ (comma) in a few places rather than ‘.’ (period) for USD ($) currency notation.
ex: “Revenue per member stands at $5,46 for Mixi..” -> $5.46
otherwise, informative piece… would love to see more like this on other Japanese / Asian web services & products.
Nas sez: >>My advise for Americans expanding their 2.0 empire to Asia: Look elsewhere besides Japan - think China, India and South East Asia..
actually, i think there is an often overlooked entrepreneurial opportunity in Japan. while i don’t profess to know the local market / culture as well as others who live there, my wife is Japanese and i usually spend a few weeks a year there visiting her family / other friends.
my personal perspective is that — altho it’s changing for the positive over the past 10 years — the local Japanese market for internet entrepreneurship is rather underdeveloped, especially given the size of the online Japanese economy.
not sure why exactly, but i would attribute this partially to a traditional cultural bias that makes it more challenging for non-conformist entrepreneurial behavior (”the nail that sticks up gets hammered down…”), as well partially to a lack of VC market development & other financial capital access for smaller startups. again, i believe this is changing, but slowly. i think some of the Mixi investors are starting to invest more like US-based angels / VCs, but outside of hardware & chip industries, seems like there aren’t that many internet startups in Japan compared to the market / population / economics.
given this mismatch, i wonder if there isn’t a “entrepreneurial cultural arbitrage” opportunity for to do more startup efforts in Japan, working with local partners… obviously there is a huge cultural / language issue to overcome, but i’m not sure why this is any more difficult than in other asian countries, except perhaps due to Japanese feeling less comfortable working with non-Japanese partners (altho i don’t see that being the case with other industries where the Japanese work well with foreign partners…).
anyway, i’d be interested to hear other opinions. still feels like for those willing to learn the language & culture, there’s a huge opportunity to go after. altho the population isn’t nearly as large as China, India, or SE Asia; on the other hand the GDP per head & online penetration is huge.
mixi was here early, and that’s the only reason it remains. its like the eBay of japanese SNS; with that much network effect it will take a few years to run into the ground, despite their best efforts to stand still.
Their only serious competitor, “Gree” is now focused exclusively on mobile, since being bought by KDDI (one of the mobile operators here).
Mixi was fast out of the gate to copy friendster, but has since been frozen. Worse, people here seem to not want anything more. Geocities 2007版
Indeed the restriction of requiring a mobile phone number from Japan was recently put into place. I experienced this firsthand when I tried to create an account for my (Japanese) wife. This is pretty ridiculous considering that it inhibits Japanese living abroad from creating a Mixi account.
The article seems to imply that Find Job (job site) came after Mixi (SNS) as a way to monetize the SNS, while in fact Find Job was already a successful service before Mixi was launched, and was even cleverly used as a promotion platform when the network was introduced.
mixi is not well known in China.
from this article,i feel like the facebook in Japan…
I know more people who have mixi accounts than Myspace…
Hi, I’m Japanese and my job is finance at a US tech company in Japan.
I’m quite concerned about the actual state of Japanese internet environment.
I totally agree with Nas and dave mcclure especially in terms of Web2.0.
I would have to say, yes, Japan is absolutely a developing country and a closed garden in Web2.0. As mentioned above, there’re multi-diciplinary factors that make it difficult to adapt to the fast-moving web environment, which are principally language and culture, and one thing that, I think, should be focused on is education.
The main stream of Japanese education is basically unilateral lecture style from teachers, and it’s been a popular style for many years while it’s recently changing little by little. We don’t have as many discussions or debates as you do in class in the Western countries. This means our education system is lacking interactive approach and is underestimating the value of sharing something with others, which are definitive components of Web2.0.
We didn’t need to promptly acquire the skill sets or minds until facing the globalization, but now many of us are realizing the importance and the urgent need of these. But it’s difficult and takes time to adjust.
Mixi is adopting the closed invitaion style and it certainly provides the sense of security for most Japanese who don’t use their real name on the Web.
As another symbolic figure, in Japan the search giant supported by the majority of the poople is Yahoo, not Google. As you see the crowded contents of the Yahoo’s front page, many Japanese like the given stuff instead of seeking information proactively. And I would think that attitudes, plus incidentally the lack of aspiration of entrepreneurship, are not completely unrelated to our education system and the cultural ramifications.
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add me as friend!
http://mixi.jp/show_friend.pl?id=2448339
after living in Japan for the last few years i am really over the mixi fad, but i will say the job site wa helpful a few times
please invite me as friend. I’m Bangladeshi . I like Japan as well as i know Japanese language . But i live in Bangladesh.
Thanks
Hasan
really mixi is japan’s real social network
hello fellows!
I just wanna say that I’ve been trying to find out how mixi works, so that’s why I came across this interesting website. I have some friends in Japan, and most of them have no Facebook account so it’s impossible for me to keep in touch with them…I would really like to join Mixi, but it seems it’s a little hard to do so because of my condition.
I understand Japanese people want to preserve their culture and don’t want to be influenced by other cultures, but it would be really nice for everyone if we(people from the west) could join Mixi by the method that is used currently, an invitation from someone who is already a member of Mixi..I mean, for a japanese…
I hope so!….and i’d like to add something else: I really love all from Japan: their culture and people!…it’s amazing how much we can learn from you, japanese fellows!!!!
Has anyone been advertising with Mixi? Do they have self serve advertising available like they have for Facebook.
I have been advertising successfully with Facebook my website. Mixi sounds like good way to get Japanese exposure for my website.
T
ı love lıvıng
I guess eventually when they reach a number of individual in their homeland they will expand to US. you got to remember that US have a large number of Japanese too.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com