The website unique user ranking for the first half of 2015, released by VALUES, the IT survey company, finds that the No.1 website was Yahoo! JAPAN with 62,368,000 unique users (-0.6% year on year), followed by Amazon.co.jp with 60,388,000 unique users (-0.3%) and Rakuten Ichiba with 59,125,000 unique users (-1.7%).

The following table shows top 20 websites:

As far as photo posting and movie delivery websites are concerned, Instagram remarkably increased unique users by 102.5% year on year, and also movie delivery website Hulu by 80.2%.

The following table shows the top 10 growth rates of unique user for photo posting and movie delivery websites:

At the same time, growth of news delivery websites was remarkable. The news delivery website with the biggest growth rate of unique users was nikkan-gendai.com for general news (+324.8%), followed by retty.me for gourmet news (+138.2%) and www.hochi.co.jp for sports news (+135.2%). Also, mery.jp providing information exclusively for girls largely increased unique users.

It is easier for news to spread through SNS, and popularity of photo and movie posting websites grew rapidly. Such today’s trends are behind the growth of news delivery websites, according to VALUES analysis.

The following table shows the top 10 growth rates of unique users for news delivery websites: