Hi Gerhard,
You wrote:
> Arnold,
>
> I totally agree with you.
>
> To maintain a mobile site which delivers high-quality news many
> times per day costs a lot of money.
Exactly the same can be said about non-mobile high-quality news
sites.
> This money must come from somewhere. Either from advertising, or
> from being part of a larger business model etc.
Of course.
> As an example, while lots of news sites on the fixed line
> internet are free, top quality sites like Financial Times,
> BusinessWeek, WallstreetJournal, Economist etc all require
> subscription payments for complete site access.
How do you define "top quality"? I notice that those are all sites
for English-language new sources that focus on financial news. Is
that what "top quality" means?
Is, say, the Washington Post site not a top-quality news site?
Or how about the Guardian[1]?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
That Guardian has been the winner for six years in a row of the
British Newspaper Awards for Best Daily Newspaper on the World
Wide Web.
If users don't not need to pay money to read the best English-
language general daily newspapers on the web, then after full
browsers are more widespread, they will not need to pay money to
view them on mobile devices.
And they will not need to, or be willing to, pay for a lot of
other things that they have until now been getting charged for
access to from their mobile devices.
I used to pay a subscription fee to use the hobbled mobile version
of the Eijiro on the Web E-J/J-E dictionary[2] (the vast majority
of the user base for which, by the way, is comprised of
native-Japanese speakers, not native-English speakers).
[2] http://www.alc.co.jp/
I now can use the real version of it from the full browser on my
keitai. For no fee.
> Also agree with you that for anything English in Japan the
> main market is Japanese people learning English (in terms
> of quantity this means mainly bilingual secretaries and
> highschool teachers of English, and ambitious parents -
> not high-flying executives, since that's a tiny market).
I suppose it's true that the main market is Japanese people. But
based on people I know, I am not sure that I'd describe them as
people "learning" English. Unless you mean learners in the sense
of life-long learning. The Japanese people I know who read the
English-language newspapers here seem to me to already speak
English pretty well. (And they are not just bilingual secretaries
or highschool teachers or ambitious parents.)
But anyway, that all seems beside the point. I mean, what does any
of that have to do with whether it is feasible for the newspapers
to provide their content to users online without charging the
users a fee?
--Mike
> Arnold P. Siboro wrote:
> > Gerhard, you seem to be saying free sites cannot deliver high quality
> > contents. Free and high quality are not necessarily conflicting
> > qualities.
--
Michael(tm) Smith
http://tokyo.metblogs.com/
http://sideshowbarker.net/
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/890
Received on Tue Dec 27 18:29:13 2005