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comScore has released the latest numbers on the state of affairs in the social media space in Japan. Lately the social media space in Japan has seen a heated an intense battle between entrenched Mixi.jp a local social network, and Facebook and MySpace with the launch of their Japanese language based versions in Japan.
comScore’s findings show that Facebook’s visitations has more than tripled during the previous year to reach 538,000 visitors. In spite of this Mixi.jp was the most visited site in terms of unique visitors with 12.7 million people visiting the site. MySpace on the other hand fetched 1.2 million visitors, up 10% from the previous year, with Orkut being the distant third at 638,000 visitors.
Although Orkut ranked as the third most visited site, but when it comes to user engagement it triumphed all its rivals by a huge margin. Average Orkut user spends 14.9 hours on the site as against 11.5 hours that an average Mixi.jp users spend on that site.
Clear as it may seem that Facebook and MySpace are clearly trailing Mixi.jp, this can not be taken as the final verdict. To quote the words of Maru Sato, managing director of comScore Japan:
The competition between social networks in Japan is beginning to heat up with the recent introduction of the Japanese language version of Facebook. The popular social networking site’s launch of Spanish, French and German language sites earlier this year resulted in strong traffic growth in these markets. If this is a reliable indication, we can expect to see Facebook’s growth in Japan follow a similar trend.
