keitai-l@appelsiini.net writes:
>One of the things I had been lead to believe about i-Mode was that content
>providers have a reasonble shot at making money. Apparently not:
it says about half do. If so, that is a fairly "reasonable shot" in my
book...
>erhaps I am late to the game and this was common knowledge amongst people
>in the know, but this sure as heck changes my thinking about the
>importance
>of the i-mode phenomenon and it's relevence to future mobile wireless
>services in the rest of the world.
I am a little puzzled as to why (and as to what your thinking was before
you read this rather hysterical and silly article). Some sites within the
docomo portal make money, some do not. Some sites outside the portal make
money for the site owners (directly or otherwise) and some do not. Not all
that different from the web in fact. Except that if your site is within
the portal, billing is rather easier...
Why is any of this a surprise and why should it change anyone's attitude
to I-mode in a negative way? Sure - imode is not a license to print money
for people with i-mode sites - but who ever believed it was?
>to the non-exportable business
>model,
Why exactly is it non-exportable?
>to the extreme devotion of Japanese to there keitai's
Extreme? - sure - people like their keitai's - but Japanese keitai are
rather more likable. I have just hit London this morning and my - English
keitai are so QUAINT and UGLY and CLUNKY! (so are English people actually
- it is like walking into a Dicken's novel - how this Englishman has got
used to the svelte Japanese....)
>and cute
>gadgetry in general, i-mode suddenly looks like little more then a
>cultural
>curiosity.
Er - I fail to see anything in your email that demonstrates this, and
anything in the article that really suggests it. Do you regard the www as
merely a cultural curiosity simply because many websites do not "make
money" directly or otherwise for the companies that own them?
(from the article)
>** Control a large number of the Web sites that you regularly visit
well - in-portal sites are regularly visited because they have quality
content. They have quality content because docomo requires they do as a
condition of being a portal site. Docomo don't stop you going to a
non-portal site, nor do they try to control or restrict them.
I found the second part of the article rather undermined the first. The
first was 'shock horror, imode controlled by corporate entity, not
profitable for sites" and the second "shock horror, sex on imode, very
profitable.
In particular I was rather perplexed by the way the author could conclude
that sex sites must be profitable because they keep going but that non-sex
sites that keep going could not be profitable...
I think the "dirty little secret" is that the site wants our ad
impressions.
Nick
>
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Received on Thu Sep 6 18:29:41 2001