(keitai-l) Re: Is the i-mode content biz hit based?

Gerhard,

Actually the issue of 2000 or 3000 or 50000 is not really the point. What 
I was attempting to ask was how do the sites that are popular get popular. 
Does their popularity  follow the pattern of hit movies or songs or not? 
Do users tend a garden of carefully chosen favorite links that they have 
stumbled across or had a friend point them to?

Where the 2000/3000/50000 figure is relevent to a question I have about 
usability (actually findability). I have to assume that the vast majority 
of i-mode sites are completely invisible and effectively non-existent 
simply because nobody will wade through them all. If it does not appear on 
the handset opening screen or after a few clicks or scrolls, forget it. 
How on earth do these services direct users to them?

-Doug






Gerhard Fasol <fasol@eurotechnology.com>
Sent by: keitai-l-bounce@appelsiini.net
05/07/2002 04:38 PM
Please respond to keitai-l

 
        To:     keitai-l@appelsiini.net
        cc:     turner@uvs.is
        Subject:        (keitai-l) Re: Is the i-mode content biz hit based?



turner@uvs.is wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> As I understand it there are roughly 50,000 i-mode content services out
> there. I find it extremely hard to believe that more then a handful of
> these services even breakeven. My question is this business hit based or
> not? Do certain services become hot, and then spread like wild fire for 
a
> while? Is it a never ending "can you top this" game where content house
> womp eachother over the head trying to outdo eachother?

I think you have multiple misunderstandings here:
(1) there are about 2000 "official" imode content providers providing 
about 3000
"official" sites. There are about 50,000 "unofficial" imode sites, i.e. 
they do 
not have any particular relationship with DoCoMo.
(2) some imode sites are purely out to make money by selling content, e.g.
news, or melodies, or pictures, or weather reports etc. However, most 
commercial
imode sites are part of a much bigger company, e.g. the imode site of 
Japan-Airlines, or the imode-site of Citibank. These sites normally do not 
take 
any fees at tall, i.e. they have no way to be profitable on their own - 
rather
they extend the traditional business and give additional competitive 
advantage
to the owning business.

That's just a short explanation and the full story is much more complex. 
imode is really a big new industry, and can't be explained in a short 
email.

We made an attempt to explain imode to newcomers outside Japan in our 
imode-faq:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq.html
Reading through the following section should get you some part of the way 
to
understand the answer to your question:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq-menu.html

You can also purchase our imode-report, which explains the business models 
behind
imode in a lot more detail (apologies for the shameless plug - list 
moderator:
please delete if you only permit Nooper-commercials but no other 
commercials
on this list):
http://www.gii.co.jp/english/ek9299_i_mode.html

Gerhard Fasol
http://www.eurotechnology.com/

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