Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Japanese Mixi & DeNA Announce Partnership

PENN-OLSON – Jan 26 – Japanese social networking site Mixi and social gaming platform DeNA have announced that they will partner up in the field of social commerce to open an online mall within Mixi. While Facebook is reigning number one in social networks across the world, it has yet to overtake the hold that Mixi has on Japan, with some 25M users as of September 2011. Mobile users accounts for 80% of the total traffic. DeNA, on the other hand, operates a huge shopping and auction site that sells over 8M items, ranging from fashion to gourmet food. Users are able to shop using points and coins they collect from the gaming platform Mobage. The partnership is hoped to bring more commerce and buying to Mixi, which has already signed big companies such as Lawson, Sanrio, HMV Entertainment and Cecil McBee to its online mall.

by Yukari Mitsuhashi
See full article at Penn-Olson

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Twitter Teams Up With Japanese SN Mixi

ASSOCIATED PRESS - Nov 30 - Twitter and Japan's biggest homegrown social network mixi joined forces to strengthen their ground against a rapidly expanding Facebook. Japanese was Twitter's first foreign language platform, and it opened its first overseas office in Tokyo earlier this year.  For mixi, the announcement couldn't have come at a better time. Data released this week from Nielsen NetRatings Japan showed that mixi stood in third place behind Twitter and Facebook in terms of unique visitors in October.

See full article at CTV.CA

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Facebook May Never Beat Mixi In Japan

BLOOMBERG - Feb 7 - Facebook may not overtake Mixi in Japan as the lure of connecting with friends overseas isn’t enough for users to switch services, according to Zynga. Mixi, which began social network operations in 2004, has ~22M customers in the country, 10 times the number of Japanese Facebook users. Concerns over privacy issues and early problems with site design and translation have also set back Facebook’s popularity in the country. Zynga chose Mixi for the Japan release of its “FarmVille” hit title in December. The game is Facebook’s second most popular title with 53M users, after Zynga’s “CityVille” with 98.6M, according to researcher AppData.com. Mixi is better suited for Japanese users because it gives subscribers more control over who sees their content and personal data is more secure, President Kenji Kasahara said in an interview. FULL ARTICLE @ BLOOMBERG

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Mobile Social Networking Reports From Infinita

SNW -- Aug 26 -- Infinita, Japanese mobile market intelligence and research company, has just released new reports on the top mobile social networks in Japan - Mobagetown, GREE and Mixi. The reports are available for $3,000 each for a company license; Infinita also distribute them as a bundle for US$ 6,750. More info here http://infinita.co.jp/en/research/mega_bundle.html

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Mixi Faces Challenges As Competition Grows

THE JAPAN TIMES -- June 24 --Early last month, Mixi announced its financial results and forecast for the year: Its profit would fall by 15% from the previous year, the first such decline in growth since the company went public. The company is now opening its PC and mobile platform to third-party developers, and new applications created by them are expected to become available this summer. Mixi's move comes amid the mobile-gaming boom among Japan's young generation. GREE, Japan's third largest social network, saw the number of users to its site more than double to nearly 10m, and its profit increased multiple times over the past year on the back of popular mobile games created in house. FULL ARTICLE @ THE JAPAN TIMES

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5 International SN To Keep An Eye On

CNET NEWS -- Dec 18 -- It's a big world out there and Facebook and MySpace don't own it.

China: Xiaonei
Xiaonei is basically a Chinese Facebook clone.

France: Skyrock
Skyrock started as a blog in 2002, which was eventually abandoned in 2007 and turned into a social network. It was the right move.

Germany: StudiVZ
StudiVZ is, well, an almost exact replica of Facebook, but without the company's signature blue design.

Japan: Mixi
Mixi controls almost every aspect of the member's profile design and structure and it doesn't even let third-party developers deploy apps on the site.

South Korea: Cyworld
Cyworld recently launched a U.S. site in an attempt to expand globally and take Facebook and MySpace on directly.
FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS

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Facebook Mobile Sees 3X Growth

READWRITE WEB -- Nov 11 -- Facebook has seen users of its mobile site, m.facebook.com, jump from 5m to 15m this year. The most recent change made to the site, allowing comments to be posted on status messages from your phone, resulted in more than 1 million mobile posts in the first 24 hours. Facebook Mobile is now probably bigger than the entire userbase of Mixi, Japan's leading social network. Last week 6 leading Japanese social networks, including Mixi, MySpace Japan, Yahoo and others, announced that the companies are forming a mysterious alliance that could include content and widget sharing across their mobile sites. FULL ARTICLE @ READWRITE WEB

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Japan's Online Social Scene Isn't So Social

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD -- Sep 26 -- The vast majority of mixi's roughly 15m users don't reveal anything about themselves. It's not just mixi. It's Japan. Fewer than half of Match's members in Japan are willing to post their photos, compared with nearly all members in the U.S. Google, which operates YouTube, has tried to convince the Japanese to loosen up, running events in Tokyo in which girls in miniskirts roam the streets with giant picture frames and video cameras, soliciting pedestrians to frame themselves and record a clip for the site. "When we did research in Japan, we found that the No. 1 reason for not using online dating is that they don't know if people are real or not," says Match.com's Japan president, Katsu Kuwano. The company hopes to make more people show themselves online by defining itself in a less Web-centric way. Match has also held offline events at Tokyo restaurants. FULL ARTICLE @ SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

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Mixi Tops Facebook And MySpace

BUSINESS WEEK -- Aug 26 -- Mixi may not have the global reach of social networking giants Facebook and MySpace, but in Japan it's a king. The Tokyo company had 15m users as of June, a 40% gain from 10.7m a year earlier. In June, Mixi accounted for 12.4m, or 41%, of the 31m unique visitors for all SNS in Japan, according to comScore. MySpace was a distant second, with 1.2m visitors, followed by Orkut's 638,000 and Facebook's 538,000. As Mixi draws more clicks, its clout with online advertisers grows. That's important for Mixi because online ads account for 85% of its $92m in annual revenues. Japan's Internet ad spending is set to rise 20%, to $5 billion, this year, according to Dentsu Communications Institut. By 2011, the figure could top $6.9 billion.FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WEEK

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Mixi Brings OpenID To Its Users

READ WRITE WEB -- Aug 25 -- Mixi, the giant Japanese social network, is now acting as an OpenID provider. The service is also providing a mechanism for users of 3rd party sites to limit access to content elsewhere to visitors who are their friends on Mixi. Along with OpenID, Mixi announced the availability of a developer platform. FULL ARTICLE @ READ WRITE WEB

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Why Facebook And MySpace Are Failing In Japan

TECH CRUNCH -- Aug 3 -- While Mixi performs very well in Japan, MySpace and Facebook barely register, hardly making it to the top 100 most popular sites for Japan’s 90 million web users.  The reasons:  Failure to adapt to cultural differences such as non-verbal communication and the need for security; poor translation to the Japanese language, few Japanese language based widgets, lack of blogging and lack of an optimized version of the sites for mobile handsets.  These sites can recover a number of ways including a version for connecting professionals. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Mixi

MySpace

Facebook

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Japan's Mixi: A Purely Local Phenomenon

TECH CRUNCH -- July 22 -- Japan's biggest social network Mixi now boasts over 15m members. The site ranks sixth on Alexa Japan and racks up over 14 billion page views monthly. Market capitalization currently stands at $970m, bringing the company close to LinkedIn's $1 billion value. Mixi 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 $36.5m to $82.4m on a year on year basis. Find Job! alone contributed another $11.6m. Net profits for the company as a whole grew 79.9% to $19m in the same time frame. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Mixi

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Mixi Sets Up Unit In Shanghai

JAPAN CORPORATE NEWS -- July 18 -- Japan's largest social network Mixi has established a wholly owned subsidiary in Shanghai to launch services in the Chinese market. Mixi plans to launch its social networking services in China as early as this year. Mixi President Kenji Kasahara will concurrently serve as head of the Chinese unit, which is capitalized at 2.7m U.S. dollars. FULL ARTICLE @ JAPAN CORPORATE NEWS

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Rivalry in Japanese SNS Heats Up

AFP -- May 20 -- MySpace launched in Japan on Tuesday a day after Facebook launched a Japanese version.  MySpace said it was partnering with 33 companies in Japan. The partners include some of Japan's largest recording companies EMI Music Japan and AVEX Entertainment, as well as the music shop HMV. They will organise auditions and talent shows to seek out new artists. Rivalry in Japan's online social world is heating up after Facebook's entry into Japan on Monday. Facebook Japan is expected to reinforce access to the site through cellphones, which is a priority for Japanese users. Mixi's success has been helped by its mobile phone service for its 14m and more users. Last month Twitter launched a Japanese service after one-quarter of the world's access to Twitter in February originated from Japan. FULL ARTICLE @ AFP

Asia's Top Social Networks

READWRITE WEB -- Mar 30 -- Facebook has almost no presence in China, South Korea and Japan. In China, QQ dominates by far with 300m active accounts, Cyworld has close to 20m in South Korea while Mixi has 14m in Japan. Notably, QQ had 523m USD in revenues in 2007 and 224m operating profit, with only 13% coming from advertising. QQ and Cyworld make most of their money from digital goods - from background music to personalization, avatars or casual games. FULL ARTICLE @ READWRITE WEB

Mixi Plans To Expand Into China

MARKET WATCH -- Feb 20 -- Japan's popular online social networking site Mixi plans to expand into China. Mixi Shanghai Inc. will have initial capital of $2.7 million and decide later on which services to launch in China and when. Mixi currently has 13.3 million members, up from 8.01 million a year ago. Mixi's share price nearly doubled within a day of being listed in September 2006. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKET WATCH

Mark Brooks: The next Internet Dating Conference will be in Tokyo on May 8-9th.

Mixi Strong in Japan

LA TIMES -- Dec 25 -- Mixi's highly specialized online shopping circles, 900,000 virtual communities are nurtured within the 6-million-strong empire of Mixi users. In Japan such communities have become so strongly linked to the real world in recent years that they now can affect the behavior of consumers at venues as diverse as pet shops and noodle bars.  MySpace is determined to muscle in on this scene. In November, MySpace announced a joint venture with Internet and telecommunications group Softbank in a move that should see a fully localized PC-based version of MySpace operating in Japan in March. Mixi is invitation-only and receives 750 million hits per month from PC users, and nearly 2 billion hits from Japanese accessing the service on their mobile phones. FULL ARTICLE @ LA TIMES

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