Social networking is good for your wealth. Just a year or so after News Corporation paid $580m for MySpace, the social networking site’s Japanese equivalent has pulled off an impressive stock market debut. By Thursday’s close Mixi was valued just shy of $2bn.

Mixi certainly ticks a lot of the right boxes. It is the second most popular site in Japan, with 610m pageviews in July. Users tend to be more active and spend more time online than at rival sites. Reassuringly, Mixi saw a profit in each of the past three years and revenue – nearly all of which comes from advertising – is growing at a rapid clip. That should continue. Dentsu, Japan’s dominant ad agency, had just 1.2 per cent of sales online last year.