Facebook Grows In Japan; Still Tiny Compared to Leader Mixi.jp

Analytics provider comScore is out with a new report today regarding the Japanese Web social networking market. Facebook has the largest percentage growth (213%) over the period June 2007-June 2008. Mixi.jp leads the Japanese social networking category with over 12 million monthly uniques while Facebook has grown to just over 500k visitors a month. It’s important to note that this comScore report does not include mobile social networking usage. This would be a very interesting bit of analysis since mobile usage is so high in Japan.

MySpace is second with 10% of the traffic Mixi.jp has but doubles Facebook in unique visitors. While we here in the states seem to believe Orkut is dead, it’s beating Facebook in unique visitors by 20% for June 2008. comScore also notes that Orkut users have the heaviest engagement noting, "…in this study across several measures, including average usage days per visitor (11.5), average minutes per visitor (454), and average pages per visitor (1,557). Mixi.jp also generates fairly heavy engagement, while Facebook.com and MySpace.com show more modest engagement thus far."