世論 What Japan Thinks

With so many free web-based mail services on offer, a surprising result from a survey conducted by Marsh Inc and reported on by japan.internet.com into web email was that a number of people do actually pay for it.

Demographics

Between the 29th of November and the 2nd of December 2008 300 people from the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% were in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

Unfortunately, this survey did not report what sort of services people were paying for, although perhaps if you paid Marsh some money they’d tell you. I suppose I could say that I pay for two web mail services; one through this web site hosting as I do use the web mail reading facility, and the other is PoBox.com that I use for mail forwarding my private email, although I don’t use their web mail, which is an additional charge.

Research results

Q1: Do you use a web mail service? (Sample size=300)

Yes (to SQs)	44.3%
No	55.7%

Q1SQ1: What web mail service do you mainly use? (Sample size=133)

Yahoo! Mail	60.2%
Hotmail	15.8%
Google Gmail	6.0%
goo Free Mail	5.3%
Infoseek Mail	3.8%
Excite Mail	2.3%
Other	6.8%

Q1SQ2: Do you use a paid-for web mail service? (Sample size=133)

Using	6.8%
Not using	91.0%
Don’t know	2.3%

Q1SQ3: Do you think you’d want to use a paid-for web mail service in the future? (Sample size=133)

Want to use	7.5%
Can’t say either way	30.1%
Don’t want to use	62.4%