How are Yahoo, Google and Facebook doing in Asia?

An update on how some of the big digital players are doing in Asia:

Searches on Yahoo! sites grew 13% year-over-year in January in Japan. Google sites, including YouTube grew just 5%, however the comScore data does not count mobile searches, which is big in Japan. So who said that Yahoo! was down and out? Yahoo! may find themselves behind the ball game in N.America and Europe, but in APAC, it’s an entirely different ball game. Similar to Japan, Yahoo! finds themselves as the top search engine in Hong Kong and Taiwan. We’ve also seen local players take strong footholds of being number 1. – for example, Baidu in China and Naver in South Korea.

Talking about China – in this massively growing internet market, international giants like Google and Facebook are having trouble making gains with the 300 million Chinese online users.  While these companies struggle to conquer market share in China and to create viable business models everywhere, their Chinese clones have built lucrative cash machines literally earning billions of dollars a year relying more on micropayments. Unfortunately, adopting Chinese methods may not help American social networks due both to cultural differences in Chinese user behavior and industry practices. Social networking has increased rapidly in the last year across the world. China is a case in point. China’s leading SNS are local players that are driven by users engaged heavily in applications, which is very different from the US. Whereby branded pages work well in one market, they may not have as great an impact in another.

So understanding cultural norms and market differences will directly affect how advertisers engage with the audience. Marketers should review the best mix of top and secondary sites and search engines to fully intercept the audience.

Source: UM newsletter May