* In a revealing market research report out last Friday on Japan's CNET news website, Japanese teens are leaving the official carrier listings in favour of mobile search when trying to find a mobile service or online resource.
The multiple-choice survey taken over a representative sample of Japanese teens in the 13-19yr age segment, showed that users prefer searching using mobile search in 70.1% of cases, as opposed to official mobile carrier listings in 47.1%. Digging a little further within the categories of services searched for using either official listings or mobile search, users favoured official listings only for news/weather and train schedules, with 71.7% and 65.6% respectively. All other categories favoured mobile search, ranging from traditional content downloads (wallpapers 78.4%, ringtones 60.5%, multimedia content 77.8%), to word-of-mouth information or specialist information (such as blogs 76%, fashion/cosmetics 58.7%, food/drink/shopping 55.4%).
At the Tokyo Entrepreneur's Summit a few weeks ago in central Tokyo, I summed up the situation in 4 words: "official listings are finished". This caused a generalized uproar among other panel members that made their money during the closed-door clique of the early i-Mode days, but let the truth be told: your days are numbered.
With the arrival of the QR mobile barcode and flat-rate mobile data plans, small-to-medium firms to boutique interest sites are moving to set up their own mobile sites and market direct to their customers. If NaviblogX can help them in their endeavour, then so be it. Even a few years ago, official sites were the only way forward to get your site out with enough critical mass to generate revenue. Now it's merely a survival-of-the-deepest-pockets exercise, where established companies throw money at established carriers to get higher up on the list. This doesn't help the industry, nor does it boost its base. While the barons play, the poor scavenge. It doesn't need to be like that anymore, and users are voting with their feet.
