Hello,
Ok. Let me ask this a little less quickly this time. That obviously
didn't work.
Most businesses have to justify all of the expenses in their budgets. Even
though from a sheer cash flow basis a content or service site isn't
generating revenues, if there are increases in customer loyalty,
satisfaction, brand recognition, etc.. (all which have monetary values
associated with them) that business will continue. Wells Fargo shut down
their wireless site in the US, because of a lack of customer interest,
while their online site remains best in class. Obviously, the increases in
customer loyalty, satisfaction, etc... didn't offset the costs of
development and maintenance, and the project got shut down... Because I
don't have good information on what mobile businesses are shutting their
doors each day (if anyone has this type of information, I'd love it!!), I'd
like to get a general understanding of how companies are faring in their
efforts from the profitability side.
It may be meaningless on an industry level, but for an individual marketing
exec trying to make the decision of just how much to invest in a mobile
presence, I think any benchmark is considered helpful. How about this,
forget the profitability question for a second. Do either of you (or
anyone else on this list) have information on subscriber levels for
different types of business categories or individual businesses? Does
anyone track this or are they compelled to report this somewhere? Is there
a report or organization tracking this regularly? Cybird says that they
have 3.4 million subscribers as of march 2003, Xavel has also publicly
quoted subscription numbers for Girlswalker. Again, if an exec in the
consumer products sector can get a sense of how similar companies in japan
or other markets are faring in terms of subscribers, etc... that would be
great information to have.
So back to you all. Any legitimate sources of information on either
subscription levels across different sites or groups of sites,
profitability measures for these, or even any sites tracking mobile content
or service sites shutting down? Any and all feedback would be
appreciated...except more folks telling me my questions are meaningless....
one a day is enough.
--Philip
At 03:24 PM 8/13/2003 +0900, you wrote:
>Jeffrey L. Funk wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > the percentage of profitable content businesses is a fairly meaningless
> > number. there are always a large percentage of firms that don't make money
> > particularly during the early years of an industry. for example, there
> were
> > 75 manufacturers of automobiles in the US in 1925, most of whom were
> > clearly not profitable.
>
>I totally agree with Jeff! Here are some more numbers:
>
>US Telegraph companies:
>1855: 50 companies
>1857: 6 companies
>1866: 1 company dominates
>
>US Railroads:
>1920: 186 major railroad companies
>1980: 39 major railroad companies
>
>US Cars:
>1908: 253 car companies
>1920: 108 car companies
>1929: 80% of cars are produced by Chrysler, Ford or GM
>
>PCs:
>1988: 45 PC companies
>1993: 100 PC companies
>2003: 51% of US market = Dell & HP
>
>The mobile industry is in the early stage, and much consolidation
>will come. As Jeff says, most of the i-mode industry will in the
>long run not be selling ringing tones and cartoon characters, or
>dating services of some kind. As I said in the previous email
>selling of JR-Tokkai Shinkansen tickets at US$ 125 a pop is not
>trivial, and it's off the DoCoMo balance sheet and off the DoCoMo
>statistics, and the profits are probably hidden elsewhere in
>JR-Tokkai's accounting. Their i-mode services even might appear
>as a loss-making IT-cost-center in the accounting.
>
>Gerhard
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>fasol_at_eurotechnology.com http://www.eurotechnology.com/
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Received on Wed Aug 13 10:13:20 2003