世論 What Japan Thinks

infoPLANT recently published a survey that looked into the usage of fee-charging mobile phone sites. The fieldwork for the self-selecting survey was conducted over a week from the 3rd to 10th of April 2007.

Demographics

5,207 people chose to fill out a public questionnaire available through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 39.4% of the sample was male, 3.2% in their teens, 31.0% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 3.4% aged fifty or older.

This survey is notable for one figure I’d been hoping to find in regards to infoPLANT, namely how many of their respondents are on fixed-price data programs, or パケ放題, pakehoudai, plans as they are known in Japanese. This survey had five in six of the respondents on these deals. This higher than I expected figure should always be borne in mind when reading future or past infoPLANT self-selecting iMode surveys, as this class of user does not need to worry about, for instance, the rather horrendously large bill that can be run up downloading an audio track; nearly 9,000 yen on a standard plan for a 5 megabyte audio file, and still around 450 yen on DoCoMo’s best discounted packet deals. Investigating further, the percentage of customers who have unlimited packet plans was around 27% as of September 2006 (see page 27) and about 30% at the end of 3Q 2006 (31st December 2006) (see page 2), so one can see the bias inherent in this kind of open survey conducted by infoPLANT.

Also note, even if you are on an unlimited packet program, if you use your mobile phone as a modem, these data packets are not free; stories have been recently circulating about people not reading the fine print correctly and running up over a million yen in data transmission charges!

Survey results

Q1: About how many mobile phone pay sites do you use? (Sample size=5,207)

	All	Male N=2,054	Female N=3,153
One	27.0%	25.4%	28.0%
Two	19.1%	18.6%	19.3%
Three	14.5%	12.7%	15.6%
Four	6.2%	5.9%	6.4%
Five	5.5%	5.3%	5.7%
Six	1.8%	1.6%	2.0%
Seven or more	4.8%	5.3%	4.4%
None	21.1%	25.2%	18.5%

There were interesting age trends to notice – comparing women in their twenties with those in their forties the percentage using five or more sites almost doubled. Men, however, only had a slight increase in the numbers of heavy pay site users.

Q1A: About how many mobile phone pay sites do you use? (Sample size=5,207, by packet plan type)

	Unlimited plan N=4,345	Not unlimited plan N=862
One	26.1%	31.6%
Two	19.4%	17.6%
Three	15.1%	11.3%
Four	6.8%	3.1%
Five	6.2%	2.2%
Six	2.1%	0.3%
Seven or more	5.6%	0.8%
None	18.8%	33.1%

Q2: What kinds of mobile phone pay sites do you use? (Sample size=4,106)

	All	Male N=1,536	Female N=2,570
Game	33.5%	36.2%	31.9%
MIDI-style ring tones	27.1%	24.3%	28.7%
Music, film, arts	25.5%	18.0%	29.9%
High-quality ring tunes	24.7%	22.6%	26.0%
Fortune telling	13.4%	7.2%	17.1%
Wallpaper	13.3%	10.9%	14.7%
Mail, deco mail icons and templates	12.5%	6.7%	16.0%
Newspaper, news	12.1%	17.9%	8.7%
Weather	11.6%	16.3%	8.8%
Pachinko, horse racing, etc	9.2%	17.8%	4.1%
Travel information	8.7%	9.7%	8.1%
Sports, sports news	8.5%	14.6%	4.8%
Magazines, novels, comics	7.9%	4.1%	10.2%
Maps, roads information	6.6%	11.6%	3.6%
Television, radio station official site	4.8%	6.0%	4.1%
Fashion, cosmetics, beauty	4.0%	1.4%	5.6%
Television programme official site	2.3%	2.5%	2.2%
None of the above	7.8%	8.1%	7.6%

Q3: How do you often obtain information regarding mobile phone pay sites? (Sample size=4,106)

	All	Male N=1,536	Female N=2,570
Mobile phone web site	87.5%	85.6%	88.7%
Mobile phone mail	28.1%	25.7%	29.5%
Books, magazines	20.2%	25.7%	18.4%
Word of mouth	9.1%	7.6%	10.0%
PC web site	7.9%	10.7%	6.2%
Television	6.1%	6.1%	6.1%
Station poster or other public transport advertisements	2.4%	3.3%	1.8%
Newspapers	1.9%	3.5%	1.1%
Radio	1.0%	1.8%	0.5%
Other	3.0%	2.9%	3.1%

Mobile phone email was significantly more of a source of information for men over fifty and women over forty, with close to double the average.

Q4: In the future, do you think your use of mobile phone pay sites will increase? (Sample size=4,106)

	All	Male N=1,536	Female N=2,570
Increase	11.8%	14.8%	10.0%
Perhaps increase	25.5%	26.4%	24.9%
Not change	47.9%	44.9%	49.8%
Perhaps decrease	11.2%	10.3%	11.8%
Decrease	3.6%	3.6%	3.6%