I would also like to turn it around. People are educated that the portal is
offering
them what they need, in a service-wide unified user interface, always near
where they
expect it.
In this regard, take notice of the transaction costs theory of Coase (1937)
and
revised by Williamson (1993). They argue that finding information,
negiotiating prices
etc, also costs money. Therefore, if you compare these costs with the small
amounts
people have to pay for content it sometimes is cheaper to take that what is
the most
easy for you to do and not go for the free content.
I hear a lot of bull saying that people won't pay for ringtones on their
portal
because they can get it for free on the Internet. Well, we are selling
wagonloads
of them just because people find it very easy to have it in the portal and
don't
want to spend time searching for them and rather pay a small amount for it.
Of course, the fact that we bill our customers seemlessly for this, helps!
Best regards,
Paul
The above does not necessarily represents the opinion of my employer.
>It's a litle bit of everything. I have looked at official sites, and dont
>see anything that the unofficial sites dont offer. For example, I could pay
>300 yen a month to download 3 new ringing tones from an official site, or I
>could do a search on my site's search engine and download them for free.
>Just like AOL, imode is trying to give its newbie users an easy to use
>interface and high quality contents. Once the users become educated, which
>may take longer on imode, due to the ease with which people can access
>official sites, and lack of mobile ISP competition, people will hopefuly
>migrate to unofficial sites. Alternative site payment systems may also
>help.
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Thu Feb 15 14:45:13 2001