
Why Yahoo Japan Is Worth Nearly As Much As Yahoo - nickb
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/23/3-reasons-why-the-internet-in-japan-is-ruled-by-one-single-company-yahoo/
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delackner
There are a lot of factoids in that article that sound impressive, but all the
junk obscures the simple reason Yahoo Japan is such a massive success.

The Japanese internet is very small, compared to the english language
internet, so when Google stepped in with just pagerank and no human-powered
indexes, Yahoo's colloquial indexing was able to provide a better experience.
Even today, any time I search in Japanese, google seems to provide much less
useful results.

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ComputerGuru
Honestly, this is one of the most well-written and well-researched articles
I've seen on TechCrunch in a long time - excellent read, very interesting
stuff there!

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tl
I disagree with one of the article's points: That Yahoo! outperforms Google in
Japan. Reading the (poorly labeled) graph, we have the following numbers:

Yahoo! in Japan: 40-45k eyeballs

Google in Japan: 20-25k eyeballs

If all eyeballs are equivalent (ad money for a Google eyeball = ad money for a
Yahoo eyeball), then Yahoo would be making around twice as much. However, they
have this problem:

"Currently, Yahoo Japan is owned 40% by local telecommunications powerhouse
SoftBank and 33% by Yahoo in the US, demonstrating a textbook perfect
Japanese-foreign joint venture structure."

Ok, so Yahoo! effectively gets 1/3 of twice the market value that Google gets.
So, how is Yahoo!'s localization and extra push from SoftBank helping Yahoo!?

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daniel-cussen
It says eyeballs in thousands; Yahoo has 40-45 M, Google has 25 M.

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zandorg
Masayoshi Son was once the SECOND richest man in the world, after BillG, at 70
billion dollars!

The guy who ran Hikari Tsushin (mobile phones, internet) is even more
interesting! He was worth about 40 billion at the Hong Kong bubble peak, and
is now worth a lot less. But it's cool to be up there once!

[Edit] Relevance - Son owned a lot of Yahoo (not just Japan) and was worth
tons for it.

#618 Yasumitsu Shigeta is the other guy, and is just up there due to being
bubble cool!

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mynameishere
I've always wondered about the dollar value of Yahoo's most obvious liability:
The name "Yahoo". Perhaps the Japanese don't translate this into "Stupid
Idiot".

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maxklein
That is a liability? As is the name "GoDaddy", right? You are quite ignorant
about branding if you think that the name Yahoo is a liability. So what is
your suggestion: best-search-engine-and-portal-online.com?

