Great Chitter Chatter - Stories from Loud Voices

A huge website in its own rite, Yahoo Japan is widely popular and financially worth almost as much as the U.S. based Yahoo site. These two websites have several similarities, but if you take a look at the Japanese style website, then the differences between them clearly jump out at you. The U.S. based Yahoo Company actually owns around 34% of the Japanese site.

The Yahoo site in Japan offers several different categories of interest to those who use it. They offer a broadband service, the ability to shop online, a business solution center and an auction site, among many other items. This is most likely why this site is so widely popular with the Japanese people. They of course, also offer many traditional items that one would expect to find on a yahoo site. These include email, the ability to set up web pages that can be personalized, and message boards. There is also a social network available that is named Yahoo Days.

If you took a look at the Yahoo Japan website, then you would notice significant differences from the U.S. Yahoo site, other than the use of the Japanese language. To those who are not familiar with the site, it would most likely look very cluttered and perhaps even a bit unorganized. For the Japanese people, this is not the case. It is true that the front page of the site contains a lot of information, but start pages that are crammed full of information are expected in the modern Japanese culture of the internet. Another item that might shock those not familiar with the Japanese internet is the fact that while the Japanese people love their online auctions, Ebay is not an auction craze. Ebay actually opened an office in Tokyo back in 1999, yet it could not compete with the Japanese Yahoo auction site.

While there are some similarities between the U.S. Yahoo website and Yahoo Japan, the differences greatly outweigh them. The Japanese Yahoo site is widely popular, as it is the U.S. site, and garners a huge amount of traffic each month. This website contains several different elements, including an auction site, online shopping, and broadband services. The front page offers a huge amount of information that keeps the Japanese people who are surfing online, updated on everything from business news on Japanese companies, to the latest happenings in pop culture and celebrity news.