The State of the Japanese Net, VI

by Forest Linton

In the January 1998 survey, Network Wizards has changed its methodology for gathering data. Previous surveys counted the number of domain names having assigned IP (Internet protocol) addresses. The new survey, however, reverses the procedure and counts the number of IP addresses that have been assigned a domain name. Although this is a small change, it means that the new data cannot accurately be compared with the old data. Once Network Wizards has taken a few surveys using the new method, there will then be sufficient history to judge whether past trends are continuing.

Until then, I've decided to compare the number of host servers per population for each country in the top ten. The new column (hosts per 1000 people) is a significant indicator of the rate of penetration of the Internet into each country. There are a couple of interesting items to note: Although Japan has the 2nd-highest number of hosts worldwide, it has the 2nd lowest (among the top ten) number of hosts per capita. Finland has the highest number of hosts per capita, and France has the lowest. This information will become even more useful once we can see trends.

Japan Net snapshot
Yahoo! is the busiest website in Japan, averaging 80 million page views per month (which is far ahead of the number two website). The rest of the top ten ranking often changes, but typically includes the top newspapers, other search engines, and the Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape start pages. These sites fall in the range of 2 to 10 million page views per month. Informal estimates peg the current amount of advertising spending on the Web at around $80 to $100 million. The popular search engines and newspaper websites get the majority of this.

There are now over a dozen search engines actively competing in the Japanese marketplace -- more than in the US. Many are sponsored by large companies with deep pockets: NTT, Fujitsu, Softbank, etc. A shakeout is looming on the horizon, but right now this is a very active segment.

Every major Japanese newspaper has a (usually bilingual) site, and many also offer free hourly headlines. Japanese magazines, too, have flocked to the Web, but for the most part they are only advertising their paper publications (meaning they don't offer much free content).

There are about 50 sites offering some sort of "push" contents service. These range from push channels in IE or Pointcast to simple e-mail news services -- which just may be the most savvy form of push yet.

Olympic website breaks records
According to Newsbytes Pacifica (http://www.nb-pacifica.com/), IBM reports that the Nagano Olympic website (http://www.nagano.olympic.org/) -- with 35,000 pages, four clusters of servers in both Japan and the US, and the ability to view all data in English or Japanese -- is the largest sports website in history. During the Japanese ski-jump team winning announcement, the site set a new record, registering 98,226 hits within one minute (the equivalent of 140 million hits in a day). And on February 16, the Olympic website received a daily high of 49.4 million hits. The site was expected to register over 600 million hits before the Nagano games were over.

Japan's browser wars
Three months after Microsoft's IE 4 shipped in Japan, it bumped Netscape Navigator out of the #1 spot to became the most popular browser in Japan. A recent survey by Dataquest Japan (http://www.dataquest.co.jp/) found Microsoft's share to be 53% in late December 1997, compared to Netscape's 45%. This share was determined by measuring the access logs of popular sites like Yahoo! Japan, ZD Net Japan, and NTT's Goo.

January 1998 Network Wizards survey results

Country			Hosts			Population			Hosts/1000 pop.
United States*			17,252,053			270 million			63.9
Japan(.jp)			1,168,956			125 million			9.4
Germany (.de)			994,926			82 million			12.1
UK (.uk)			987,733			58 million			17.0
Canada (.ca)			839,141			30 million			28.0
Australia (.au)			665,403			18 million			37.0
Finland (.fi)			450,044			5 million			88.3
Netherlands (.nl)			381,172			16 million			24.4
France (.fr)			333,306			58 million			5.7
Sweden (.se)			319,065			9 million			36.3

World Total 29,669,611

This is the sixth in Forest's series of reports tracking the growth of the Internet in Japan, and his 40th "Digital Forest" (previously, "The Internet") column for Computing Japan. He reports that he has received over 1,000 e-mail messages of encouraging feedback and constructive criticism. Keep the feedback coming to forest@gol.com.

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