Monday, January 28, 2008

The fall and decline of Mixi

How Alexa finds the difference between mixi.jp, facebook.com, and myspace.com.

You will see how the Japanese SNS giant Mixi is smaller than the rest of the world. Even worse, Mixi is losing the users, at least from the PC/Internet domain.

Mixi's markering target is shifting towards the Keitai (cell phone) users, which will not show up on the Alexa pageview statistics. I think this is a bad change of tactics, at least for their business. The number of Keitai users (of cell-phone users in and only in Japan) has already been saturated and does not have much room to grow any more. If Mixi depends on the ad business, the revenue will decline.

And I feel the emptiness of Mixi every day as one of the users; less number of diary articles, less frequent updates, and the persistent scanning by bots. It's getting more and more like a deserted city.