世論 What Japan Thinks

infoPLANT recently published the results of a survey they conducted into the use of mobile phone web sites. As usual for infoPLANT, they gained their respondents by means of a self-selecting public questionnaire, available for a week at the end of August through DoCoMo’s iMode mobile phone menuing system. 4,472 people, 62.1% female, successfully completed the survey.

Whenever I publish a translation of infoPLANT’s surveys I always add a disclaimer about the self-selecting nature of the survey. However, this survey gives a good picture of the habits of heavy iMode users, as I believe most of the infoPLANT respondents are, so this can be a good reference when trying to understand the other polls they have conducted.

Also, when I saw the results of the poll, I couldn’t resist the temptation to run the story with such a title!

Q1: Normally, about how often do you access web sites from your mobile phone? (Sample size=4,472)

	All	Male N=1,697	Female N=2,775
Almost every day	78.4%	80.4%	77.2%
Four or five days a week	7.7%	6.9%	8.2%
Two or three days a week	8.4%	7.1%	9.2%
One day a week	3.7%	3.9%	3.6%
Two or three days a month	1.0%	0.7%	1.2%
One day a month	0.3%	0.4%	0.3%
Less than one day a month	0.5%	0.5%	0.4%

There was very little variation by age, except for teenage boys, with 95.6% of them visiting mobile web sites almost every day.

Q2: Select from the list below what kinds of web sites you access from your mobile phone. (Sample size=4,472, multiple answer)

	All	Male N=1,697	Female N=2,775
Weather information	41.7%	43.7%	40.5%
Search site	41.2%	40.6%	41.5%
Ring tones	38.8%	33.2%	42.1%
Games	36.3%	35.5%	36.7%
Ordinary news	35.8%	42.5%	31.7%
Television or radio-related information	34.7%	34.3%	35.0%
Ring tunes (着うた, chaku-uta)	29.8%	26.5%	31.9%
Online shopping	28.3%	23.5%	31.3%
Wallpaper	28.0%	26.8%	28.7%
Celebrity or star information	22.4%	16.5%	26.1%
Deco-mail	20.5%	8.4%	27.9%
Fortune telling	19.5%	8.2%	26.4%
Fashion or cosmetics information	18.9%	6.5%	26.4%
Bulletin board or blog	17.5%	18.5%	16.8%
Sport information	17.1%	27.9%	10.6%
Travel, hotel or ticket information	16.8%	14.8%	18.0%
Traffic information	15.8%	15.0%	16.3%
Books, CD or game information	15.5%	16.4%	14.8%
Auctions	14.8%	16.3%	13.8%
Restaurant or food information	13.1%	10.2%	14.8%
Magazine-related information	12.1%	12.6%	11.9%
Job information	10.2%	6.2%	12.6%
Banking or stocks-related information	9.5%	14.2%	6.6%
Applications other than games	8.8%	11.0%	7.4%
Map information	8.5%	9.2%	8.1%
Electronic books or comics	6.8%	3.9%	8.5%
Housing information	2.9%	1.4%	3.9%
None of the above	4.1%	5.6%	3.2%

Can you see where this article’s title comes from yet?

Looking at the above table cross-referenced by each age group and sex, most of the trends go the way one might expect them, but for males, teenage boys are over twice as likely (64.4% versus 30.7% or less) to be downloading ring tune songs, and almost twice as likely (55.6% versus 33.4% or less) as any other age group to be downloading ring tones. Similarly, over half the teenage boys access wallpaper sites, and 60.0% access game sites. For teenage girls, only wallpaper sites have such large viewership rates compared to the other age groups.

Q3: Where do you usually learn about mobile phone web sites? (Sample size=4,472, multiple answer)

	All	Male N=1,697	Female N=2,775
Other mobile phone internet sites	64.7%	66.0%	64.0%
Mobile phone email	57.6%	54.4%	59.5%
Book or magazine	33.3%	33.9%	32.8%
PC internet sites	15.9%	18.6%	14.3%
Television	14.5%	13.0%	15.4%
Word of mouth	11.0%	9.5%	11.9%
Newspaper	8.8%	9.8%	8.2%
Poster in railway stations or other public transport advertisements	6.3%	7.8%	5.3%
Radio	3.2%	4.7%	2.2%
Other	8.7%	9.4%	8.3%

By age, one interesting statistic is that men aged forty or older and women aged thirty or over are more likely to learn about web sites from mobile phone mail when compared with those in their twenties. Also, teenagers of both sexes learn of sites by word of mouth over twice as frequently as any other age group.