In Japan Facebook goes from niche to mass market adoption in one year

Facebook seems to break away from a niche social network for foreigners and English-speaking Japanese users to a mass market contender. Recent numbers from Net Ratings, a Nielsen Web metrics company, show that more than 10 million users accessed Facebook from PC in August this year, marking a 5.6 times increase from the last year. The Facebook reach among PC users in Japan now accounts for 17%. In comparison, Facebook is still behind Twitter (23.6%) and Mixi (23.5%) in terms of PC reach. To be honest, the PC reach metrics may not be very indicative in the country like Japan, where the majority of users access Twitter and Mixi like services from mobile phones. For the full picture, we need to know the number of Facebook mobile users. So far, Net Ratings shared just one bit of info - 20% of Facebook users in Japan access the service from smartphones only. So, my estimate is that there are about 13 million users accessing Facebook at least once a month in Japan.

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