Japanese mobile content sites inside the walled garden of the official carrier portals have a tough time. Competition is severe and lots of free content is available on the mobile Internet not regulated by the carriers. The introduction of search engines has made it easier to find your favorite content. Over the past four years, many content providers and publishing companies have moved (part of) their content to the free public Internet.
Mobage Town is a good example of such an off-portal service offering games, social networking services and news. In April, Mobage Town had 10 million registered users and a total number of 15.6 billion page views were generated. It took only 2 years to reach these numbers.
We thought that setting up off-portal sites and making money was pretty difficult for non-Japanese companies wishing to enter this dynamic mobile market. In March we met Goal.com, a Swiss company providing soccer content on the web and mobile. In terms of page views and unique visitors, Goal.com is the world’s largest new media soccer news provider. It publishes 17 editions in 14 different languages – even a full Japanese version is available written by Japanese editors based in Europe. Joan Blaas, Vice President Mobile of Goal.com came to Japan for business development: ‘We launched our Japanese mobile site in November 2007, as of today we have more than 1 million page views a month,’ said Joan. We were not so impressed by this number. ‘Since the launch, we have not done any promotion for the site in Japan. My technical team in Europe has not even optimized the content for Japanese handsets,’ continued Joan.
Out of curiosity we took our phone and entered the URL m.goal.com in our browser. The site looked bad – images were very small and it took a long time to load. One million page views on such a site without marketing suddenly looked very good.
We advised Joan to get in touch with UBIT, a local mobile technology company that could help Goal.com with optimizing and testing the site on Japanese phones. The next step was to introduce Goal.com to Mobage Town. Within two weeks, Goal.com and UBIT adapted the site and the number of page views subsequently doubled in a month. Goal.com has plans to grow aggressively. ‘We went live with our content in Mobage Town, and expect to reach 4 million page views during EURO 2008, and aim to become the largest soccer site in 2009. With this traffic and focus on soccer, we are an interesting medium to advertise,’ said Joan. We agreed. Goal.com enjoys riding the off-portal wave.
1 comment:
Interesting to know.
Post a Comment