FindWhat & Mitsui - Any Update?

Press release Sep 03, but any action yet?

[ators]

Almost a year ago FindWhat and Mitsui announced they'd be doing PPC in Japan.

Here's the original press release [findwhat.com]. I think takagi and bill were watching talking about this for a minute, but I was wondering if anyone's seen any action from this partnership yet?

[bill]

Well, they just announced [findwhat.com] the launch of LISTOP. It's available through internet advertising agencies with a minimum bid of 5 yen. This may become popular with the lower entry rate.

"Once the self service portal is opened in August, we anticipate significant interest from small to mid-sized advertisers given the cost effective pricing model and the access to Japanese consumers afforded through LISTOP."

Here's the original thread [webmasterworld.com] ators mentioned.

[David_M]

Looks pretty good- 5000yen sign up, with the 5000yen applied to your click usage, 5yen minimum clicks. No monthly fees, decent distribution partners. They also offer an advisory service for 10,000yen.

I'll give em a try once they go live and let you all know how it goes.

[bill]

It kind of sounds like GoTo back in the good old days. ;)

Here's the LISTOP [listop.jp] website. (Japanese)

Here's a list of their partners [listop.jp] (Japanese). Although the collection seems a little underwhelming, it's a start. I'm sure Mitsui will draw some bigger names eventually once the service takes off.

[ators]

Thanks for the feedback on this. I've yet to try it myself, but will report on it once I have.

[whats up skip]

My only concern is the management of many different PPC programs. It is hard enough to manage and merge the data on what you are spending on Overture and Google let alone another operator.

Yes the competition is good. Yes 5 yen is a good way to go, but if the search distribution is not in the same order as Google then it would seem to be hardly worth the effort.

[whats up skip]

They have no option on their sign up site for foreign companies or even foreign credit card holders.

We sent them an email. It will be interesting to see the response.

[whats up skip]

We managed to obtain an account with them. Had to contact them, but they still wanted an "office" in Japan.

[bill]

I do see what you're saying about the sign-up form. It's a Japan-centric form looking for local contact information. Unfortunately that's par for the course with a lot of these sites. Hopefully they'll see the benefit of internationalizing that...someday.

However, you were able to get the account, right? Do you have any advice for others who might be interested in signing up from outside Japan?

[whats up skip]

We managed to obtain an account, but they wanted the details for our "Japan office", so we gave them the details for a friend in Tokyo. In the end they needed to call us for details of the credit card holder.

Their account management system is all in Japanese (one advantage of Google and Overture), but after a bit of practice I should be able to use it.

[bill]

So, if you don't have a contact address in Japan you can't use this service? I know that a lot of the pencil pushers in Japan can be quite inflexible. Do you think that if you pressed the issue you could have gotten away without the Japanese contact address?

[whats up skip]

May be, but given you would need to know Japanese to use their system, you are also likely to know people in Japan.

[bill]

Well, knowing the Japanese language doesn't necessarily mean you know someone's address here. And even if you did know an address would that person readily agree to be the business contact address for this PPC program?

I'm really just trying to get a feel as to whether LISTOP is flexible about business from outside Japan or whether they're sticking to their format. You did say that they took your non-Japanese credit card, so that's a good sign.

[whats up skip]

I have started looking at some of the sites in the network and there appears to be a bit of problem.

Nikkei.net is showing two ads from us. One from Overture and one from Listop.

This is not a problem with all the sites in the network, but most of them are small players.