pushing Google News in Japan

[bill]

According to this article [thestandard.com] Google is now running a campaign to promote the Japanese version of Google News on Tokyo's trains and subways. Since I don't live in Tokyo I haven't seen these, but I'd be interested to hear if they're any good.

Some interesting stats from the article:

Reach of the various news sites in February, in Japan:

• Yahoo Daily News - 13.7 million home PC users
  
• Yomiuri Shimbun (newspaper) - 4 million
  
• Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) - 2.8 million
  
• Google News - between about 900,000 and 1 million

As you can see, Google has a lot of well entrenched competition in this arena from Yahoo and the traditional news media.

The aim of the Google News campaign is to attract an extra 166,000 users to the service

[redstorm]

May i conclude that the search giant has began to diversify its utilities.

[bill]

Today it seems they are promoting their customizable News page for the Japanese. They are doing a good job with utility development on the Japanese side in general. They have a Research & Development center in Japan specifically for this task.

[David_M]

Unrelated, but if you have a few minutes...
Heres an video interview with the PR head of google japan.
It's a little old Nov 04.
[itvjapan.com...]

[hkguy]

I have been using Google News service in Japanese language for some time and found it very good in terms of ease of customisation. In comparison to Yahoo! Japan News, Google's is simpler to modify.

Only point is people in Japan are not familiar with this concept yet.