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/
Received on Tue May 7 19:38:57 2002