Japanese Media

POSTED BY DANNY CHOO On Thu 2007/07/12 20:04 JST in Misc
A quick summary of the media that I have been appearing in of late.
Was in yesterdays Nikkei Sangyo Newspaper talking about this site and how the contents, community and technology involved have lead to a modest income through affiliate services like Amazon Associates and Google Adsense etc. I didnt go into detail regarding exactly how much I make but decided to be open about the most I made in a single day last December (about 100000 yen). I also mentioned that my income from online activities has made enough for me to pay for our house, bills, food and figures ^^;
Some companies approach me offering cash to review their services or products for them. I talk about how I dont do that because by accepting money, I would be obliged to write something good even though I thought the product or service sucks - to me this would be lying to my readers. I do continue to accept free figure samples but dont guarantee a good review ^^; latest free samples are Haruka and Fauna (pictured here) ^o^
There are many services cropping up in Japan who pay bloggers to write stuff. For example, Sony would have a "the first 500 people to write a review for this product gets 300 yen" type thing. Through these "pay to blog" services, many are starting to wonder about the legitimacy of info in blogs. In Japan, people have always had a tendency to rely on the information in blogs as it was a "human" writing their views as opposed to a corporate company flogging their goods.
The scanned article. The picture makes me look even more ugly than I usually look so Mirai-chan is to my rescue^^; The gallery scan of this image is 800PX so if you read Japanese you may want to read while you have your morning dump.
The article also picks up on how corporate managed portal sites have difficulty in gaining the the sort of traffic that this site gets. dannychoo.com recently outgrew Dengeki-online and GA Graphic.
Was also in Weekly Ascii in March.
Was invited to the launch party of the dot asia domain and as usual had nothing to wear so ended up going in armor ^^;
Was in Windows 100% again.
This time round was just a ranking of all the Kaigai Otaku that the magazine ran for 5 years. They voted me number one ^^;;;
The previous article can be seen here.
Was also interviewed recently by Ascii online (Interview here).
This time I talk about how dannychoo.com developed from being a site which I used to practice my PHP and upload family photos to being an Otaku portal.
I also talk about my blog strategy and some of the features of Nav2.0. I also mention officially of my plans to license Nav2.0 in the future.
Here are a few tips for those who are interested in starting a blog and making money.
  • Use a customizable platform like
  • Write about stuff that you are passionate about. Being passionate about a something means that you will do that something well. The same goes for life - working in a field that you are passionate about enables you to reach your
  • Automate your work flow. Find tools that will help you prepare the content so that you dont have to. You should be concentrating on thinking of and writing the content - not preparing it. Look for tools that batch rotate, resize, watermark and upload your images etc.
  • Read
  • Work with other site owners to share traffic. The