世論 What Japan Thinks

infoPLANT recently conducted a survey regarding iMode users’ use of pay sites. As usual for infoPLANT, this survey was conducted via a public survey from within the iMode menu system. The survey was open for 12 days over Christmas and the New Year, and they received 6,366 valid responses, 61.1% of them from females.

As a side note, I myself recently signed up with this menu option (Toku-suru Menu) but I never actually saw any questionnaires that I could fill in and win, just a maze of twisty little passages leading to semi-spammy mailing lists!

Note that if you calculate the number of people subscribed to ring-tone sites relative to the total sample size, you find out that 34.4% of the total repsondents pay for ring tones, be it either on a one-off basis or on a monthly all-you-can-download plan. There are another 17.6% who pay for ring tunes, higher-quality music for their phone, but since there will be a number of people who pay for both services, it is difficult to estimate the total percentage that pay for music on their phones.

Q1: How many pay sites are you using through your mobile phone? (Sample size=6,366)

One site	24.8%
Two sites	17.8%
Three sites	16.2%
Four sites	6.8%
Five sites	5.7%
Six sites	1.9%
Seven or more sites	4.6%
None	22.1%

Note that the question is for current usage, not total usage. Also, most pay sites for iMode phones have their usage fees automatically billed to the mobile phone, rather than being a separate transaction, so the effort required by the user to sign up is usually just typing in their four-digit PIN. Looking at the age and sex breakdowns of the above figures I see nothing of note to report.

Q2: What kind of pay sites are you using? (Sample size=4,960, multiple answer)

	All	Male 1,849	Female 3,111
Ring tones (MIDI-based)	44.1%	40.1%	46.4%
Games	32.8%	37.3%	30.2%
Music, film, arts	27.4%	20.2%	31.6%
Ring tunes (MP3/WAV-based)	22.6%	20.6%	23.9%
Wallpaper	16.4%	12.7%	18.6%
Fortune-telling	14.0%	6.6%	18.4%
Weather	12.3%	16.7%	9.6%
Mail, deco-mail	12.0%	7.1%	14.8%
Newspaper, news	10.6%	15.8%	7.6%
Public transport connections info	10.0%	11.0%	9.4%
Pachinko, horse racing, and other gambling	9.2%	17.5%	4.2%
Sports including sports news	7.2%	12.8%	4.0%
Maps, road information	5.7%	8.9%	3.8%
TV or radio stations	5.7%	7.1%	4.9%
Fashion, cosmetics, beauty	4.8%	1.8%	6.6%
Magazine, books, comics	4.6%	3.9%	4.9%
TV program information	2.5%	2.8%	2.3%
Other	6.7%	6.4%	6.8%

One obvious member of the Other category would be dating sites.

Looking at the data for men by age, over one in three aged 50 or more susbscribe to news sites, almost double the figure for those in their forties, and over four and a half times greater than the figure for teenagers. Maps and road information also have a very similar distribution. Most of the rest of the categories have the expected trends, but mail services are used by 5% to 7% of those 49 and under, but for the over-fifties it doubles to 15.4%. Why?

For women, one interesting category is that of fortune-telling. At 8.7%, teenagers are the least likely to pay for it, but those in their thirties are most likely, at 22.1% of this sample.

Q3: For where do you mostly get your information about mobile phone pay sites? (Sample size=4,960, up to three answers)

	All	Male 1,849	Female 3,111
Other iMode sites	66.4%	65.5%	66.9%
Mobile phone mail	35.5%	31.9%	37.7%
Books, magazines	25.1%	30.0%	22.2%
Word of mouth	11.0%	9.7%	11.7%
PC-based internet site	7.9%	10.7%	6.3%
Television	6.3%	6.4%	6.2%
Newspaper	2.3%	3.7%	1.4%
Posters or other public advertising	2.0%	2.5%	1.6%
Radio	1.1%	1.9%	0.7%
Other	6.4%	6.5%	6.4%

The mobile phone mail option seems interesting. I wonder if this means spam, or mail from friends about a cool service, or links from an opt-in advertising service?

Looking at the breakdown by age and sex, teenage girls are the group most influenced by TV advertising at 14.4%; however, newspapers are most influential amongst men over 50 at 10.8%. For mobile phone mail amongst men, only 18.4% of teenagers choose this as a source of information, rising to just over half of all the sample for men over 50; 29.8% of teenage girls choose this, rising to two-thirds for over-50 women. Word of mouth transmission is over twice as common amongst teenagers of both sexes when compared to the average listed above.