There is a lot of hype and hope in the U.S. around taking social networks mobile, but mobile social networking is still in the fledgling stages in the West. In Japan, it is already a reality. One company in particular, DeNA, has taken Japan by storm with its mobile SNS/virtual world/gaming platform Mobage-town. DeNA opened a US office in San Mateo earlier this year, with plans to offer an English version of Mobage-town this fall.
Subscribers can exchange messages, chat in communities, share music, read pocket novels, and blog, among other things. The site’s “killer feature”, however, is the vast selection of free games that makes most users register in the first place.
Each of the 11 million Mobage-town members is represented by an avatar “living” in a virtual room. Both the characters and rooms can be pimped out with new clothes and wallpaper, for example. In order to do that, users must acquire “Moba Gold”, a virtual currency established by DeNA, by clicking on ads, signing up for affiliate services and inviting new members.
The circular business model has paid off for the company, which is listed on the Tokyo stock exchange (market cap: $2.3 billion). Mobage-town alone raked in $46 million in sales in the first quarter of this year and saw nearly 15 billion page views in June. And yes, this is Japan- and mobile-only.
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I’m a little confused… how can the rich/interactive UI shown above have 15B “page views”? Is that referring to some other part of their business?
Also, how is it that they can ‘pay’ users to click on ads? Is it on a CPA basis, and the advertising ecosystem in Japan is OK with this?
The main site and avatar system are basically chtml websites, so those are the 15B page views come from. Game are the content you can download from the main sites.
The main income I belived is in virtual item sales. But I dont have any number to back that up.
I’m a little confused… how can the rich/interactive UI shown above have 15B “page views”? Is that referring to some other part of their business?
Also, how is it that they can ‘pay’ users to click on ads? Is it on a CPA basis, and the advertising ecosystem in Japan is OK with this?
wow. social network in a small country like japan and that too only mobile, rakes ~50M in sales. so much for the facebook hype.
japan is a small country lmao
Hahahahaha….. He means small as compared with USA ! lolz
that too 50M in 1st quarter. assuming 200M in sales per year. but all we see on TC is posts about FB holding conference,changed thier UI,FB pulling down applications etc. Im sure we wont hear about mobage-town another time here. I request TC not be biased so much about few companies/things like FB,Iphone,Yahoo merger etc
Locally speaking, Mobage-town is imfamous for being a meeting place for child-prostitution. So you may add that they also represent the “dark-side” of mobile business.
Did you know child prostitution is acceptable in parts of Asia. The child prostitution being immoral and illegal is the exportation of American moral values imposing on other developing nations.
Japan is a messed up place without anything exportable other than hard goods. They’re simply weirdos and their culture will not transfer. It’s a little island unto itself. Next!
Stan, go play in traffic.
wow, let me guess, american?
Mobage Town recently launched its PC version. > Serkan
Their ads are profitable because there are many other mobile e-commerce sites targetting youth in Japan. So I do not think you can get success only with the mobile game portal in other market.
The reason of huge page views are, not earned casual games themselves, but Mobage provides BBS and direct messaging to each game.
@Stan, who wrote “…their culture will not transfer.”
I should ignore you like everyone else but just to mention the obvious (while watching Pokemon with my son)…
…have you ever heard of Karaoke, Anime, Super Mario Brothers, or the movies of Hayao Miyazaki?
Wow this is the next real big thing…
Why I never anticipated this big opportunity before.
Because you’re an idiot. QED.
@david Harper
the most popular video game in japan 2 years ago, was a game where you beat up your teacher. with razor blades, whips, chains etc.
is your son playing that game too?
A game matching your description is not listed on any of the top 20 game lists in Japan for 2006 or 2007.
Either way - what’s your point?
My point @Stan, “…have you ever heard of Karaoke, Anime, Super Mario Brothers, or the movies of Hayao Miyazaki?”, was that Japanese culture does export.”
Culture spreads through occupation, emigration, education, and entertainment. Entertainment the fastest and most persuasive. Make of that what you will.
the success of “mobage” is that teenagers will do anything to earn the virtual currency to make the avatar and their rooms look pretty. they can click hundreds of times of text ads (they can earn very little money but teenagers have plenty of time but no money. And affiliate is very active too, they subscribe to partnered ringtone sites or shopping sites and can earn some virtual currency, too, while DeNA is getting real money from those partner sites. Mobage business is a copy of many korean web services I think.
Can someone point me to English versions of the Korean sites that Mobage is supposedly based on?
A couple of extra details of importance:
- all games use Flash Lite so play directly in the browser (most Japanese phones are compatible)
- There is a huge team of customer service to monitor possible risks for minors
- The concept started as an ad-based model (with huge pageviews and the healthy Japanese mobile ad market - over 500 million USD in 2007) but evolved recently to direct sales of digital goods
- The model for digital goods in Asia is considered to be Cyworld in Korea. The mini-rooms / avatars of players are very similar.
- Mobile Game Town can safely be considered the *most successful mobile SNS on the planet* at that point of time.
We gave a presentation in O’Reilly’s “Graphing Social Patterns” in June comparing several mobile SNS which can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/plus.....l-networks
wow Real Cool
I wonder if Mixi will respond to this by offering games through its network. Haven’t seen anything of the sort on Mixi yet.
Mixi does, variety is far less than that of Mobage though. Light games working over Flash Lite are just common for mobile SNS players in Japan - game is not really a differentiating factor.
I guess Serkan may be thinking to introduce another big mobile SNS/game site named GREE. GREE has some 6 million subscribers.
FYI Dena had plans to move to USA last year i met with the CEO of internationnal dev at Dena and he was moving with his familiy to the Bay… Will they get to be succesfull in USa ?
If you want to see a service that is closest to this and live today in the USA—-check out m.tapatap.com on your mobile phone. Mobile social games on SNS with virtual goods and currency. If Flash was out today in the US on mobile phones in volume we would be all over it. In the meantime we are doing WAP funware games and growing a big audience. We had more than 1.2M monthly mobile uniques in June.
http://m.tapatap.com
It will be interesting to watch how this evolves in the west, social networking in a virtual world has proven it’s point so far when you look at the success of something like Second Life or World of Warcraft, so having your avatar on your cellphone might just be the next big thing for a certain target audience.