Web Giants Aim For Japanese Mobile Market

This article argues that the dominance of the mobile content market by carriers in Japan will end with the introduction of number portability, which will increase competition amongst carriers as “subscribers gravitate to content from portals like Yahoo, which they can get irrespective of their carriers”. Of course, portals like Yahoo have yet to cement their position in the mobile world…Yahoo Mobile is reported to be leading the field with 30 million page views per day, but because the market is so fragmented new competitors such as Rakuten (the leading internet mall in Japan) could take a large chunk of mobile advertising dollars — which suggest that the ad-supported content business model is expected to be profitable.
Some other interesting figures: there are 400-500 million searchable Japanese-language web pages compared with 60 million mobile web pages, which goes up to 100 million when carrier pages are included. Mobile advertising is predicted to increase to 30 billion yen (US$272 million) compared to 242 billion yen (US$2,195 million) for PC-based web ads.
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