世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com published the results of a survey by Cross Marketing Inc into pay contents for mobile phones. At the end of July they interviewed 300 people from their internet monitor group. As usual for Cross Marketing, the sample was evenly split, 50:50 male and female, and a fifth aged 18 or 19, a fifth in their twenties, and so on up to a fifth of the sample aged between 50 and 59.

The authors suggest that a key reason for people not paying very much, if at all, for mobile contents is due to the ability now to be able to surf the internet and discover lots of free content. However, to me this ignores certain obstacles like the quality of browsers and the lack of sites designed for mobiles. In addition, the most popular option, downloading ring tones, has recently become much cheaper, with lots of 100 yen (plus 5 yen tax) per month all-you-can-download sites getting heavy television promotion.

First of all, 225 of the sample, or 68.2%, said that they had paid for contents on their mobile phone.

Q1: Please select all of the pay services that you have used. (Sample size=225, mutliple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Chaku-melo ring tones (polyphonic)	145	64.4%
Applications (including games)	91	40.4%
Chaku-uta ring tunes (short samples of actual songs)	82	36.4%
Wallpaper	71	31.6%
News or other information sites	58	25.8%
Chaku-uta full (full-length high-quality songs)	27	12.0%
Chaku-voice (high-quality voice-based rings, I think)	25	11.1%
Electronic books or comics	15	6.7%
Movies	13	5.8%
Fortune-telling	13	5.8%
GPS-related	12	5.3%
Flash	11	4.9%
Karaoke	10	4.4%
EZ Channel (audio and video content channels)	6	2.7%
Dating sites	2	0.9%
Other	12	5.3%

Q2: How many monthly-billing pay services are you currently subscribed to? (Sample size=225)

One service	32.4%
Two or three services	26.2%
Four or five services	4.4%
Six to ten services	0.9%
Eleven or more services	0.4%
No services	35.6%

Q3: How much do you spend per month on contents? (Sample size=145)

105 yen or less	13.1%
500 yen or less	59.3%
1,000 yen or less	15.9%
2,000 yen or less	6.9%
3,000 yen or less	2.8%
5,000 yen or less	0.0%
More than 5,000 yen	0.7%
Don’t know or forgot	1.4%

I think the wording in the previous two questions is a bit confusing. Q2 asked who was currently subscribed to monthly services, then Q3 asks those currently subscribed how much they pay. However, since some services offer free access to browse but pay for download, or others have premium content, Q3 should have been asked to all who have paid for downloads. The other possibility is that the story is incorrect and Q3 is asking how much the monthly fees are, not the total download cost.