Adsense has been around in Japan for some years now, but the idea of individuals providing content, placing ads, and earning money through clicks has not yet found the mainstream. The idea of the mutually beneficial relationship between advertisers, content providers, and customers seeking relevant ads may take some time to catch on. This can be a blessing for content providers and advertisers looking for users who are not yet "ad blind", but also has the challenge of convincing people surfing the internet that clicking on those ads won't bring them to a malicious website. Thus at this time adsense in Japan does not seem to have matured as much as in other parts of the world such as the United States, but at the same time has some of the benefits that come with the novelty of such a marketing program.

If you decide to create a free blog in Japan, and especially if you want to make one in Japanese using adsense for revenue, you have three main platforms to choose from. The two main blogging options are Seesaa and FC2, and the third is Blogger.

First, I should explain why I decided to list Blogger as the third. Although Google is the king of search in most of the world, in Japan, Yahoo! Japan controls most of the search traffic. Google is much less popular, although Google Japan has recently been making some strides, especially in mobile search. In my experience, Blogger blogs seem harder to rank with Japan. I have rarely searched for anything in Japanese on either Google Japan or Yahoo Japan and found a Blogger blog in the top ten. The advantage of Blogger comes in its exportability, and the other functions that Blogger Japan inherits from the English language version. Seesaa and FC2 users, must not have as much need to export their blogs, or host them on independent domains.

FC2 blogs and Seesaa blogs on the other hand tend to rank well. The added benefit of FC2 blogs is the extended URL that they use to ensure that a wide variety of names are always available. The FC2 blogs tend to have URLs in the following pattern: keyword.blog##.fc2.com where ## equals a two digit number. This means that URLs with a keyword in the URL are abundantly available.

Seesaa uses the URL pattern keyword.seesaa.net, but also tends to rank well in Yahoo Japan and Google as well. Both provide a variety of sidebars and widgets for use with affiliate programs, as well as the chance to insert html and css into the blog's code.

Where FC2 holds a large advantage over Seesaa and Blogger is in the number of templates there are available for blogs. While Seesaa offers some variety, and Blogger does as well, the number of FC2 blog templates and color patterns available set FC2 apart.

I believe that adsense will continue to grow in Japan as more and more evidence of its efficacy as a marketing tool come to be known. Japanese online marketing is still a world owned by various affiliate programs with inefficient user interfaces and low click through rates coupled with low profits for content creators. For bloggers who only read and write Japanese, there are not many free resources for information about internet marketing and seo, but some sites such as Make Money Japan are making an effort to simplify and publicize the latest adsense, affiliate program, and seo developments for the Japanese blogging public.

FC2, Seesaa, and Blogger all also allow blogging in English, and FC2 has a lot of English language features that non-Japanese speakers can use to set up various blogs and other services. Blogger can be set up entirely in English, although the set up for Seesaa may require some Japanese language ability. Once everything is set up, bloggers are free to use whatever language they want, and with a little research and planning, there is a market for English language blogging in Japan, especially in areas related to learning English conversation.