Business Models of Social Media in Japan

I found this blog post "Comparing the business models of Mixi，Mobage-town，GREE，and NicoNicoDouga [ja]" by Mr. Toru Saito interesting and am writing this post inspired by his.

This is a translation of his chart, which includes some assumption on GREE's ratio of avatar sales vs fixed fee.

(data of mixi: 2008/3 DeNA:2008/3 GREE:2008/6 NicoNicoDouga:2008/9)

mixi [ja], the largest SNS of Japan depends 93% of their revenue on advertisement.

Mobage-town [ja], the leading mobile SNS/game site attracts users by free games, stimulates them to get game items and avatars which needs virtual money (Moba Gold), and in order to gain Moba Gold the users visits EC site which leads to revenue via avatars and affiliates. Avatars consists almost a half of the total revenue.

GREE [ja] started as PC SNS but lost the market to mixi, became successful by shifting to mobile SNS. They resemble a lot to Mobage-town. The biggest difference was that Mobage-town initially did not charge their users(they started doing this but is still a low ratio within the total sales), GREE does (GREE Plus for mobile, GREE premium for PC users) which makes them additional revenue source.

NicoNicoDouga [ja] is the largest third largest, but hottest video sharing site in Japan. Their "premium users" are increasing drastically recently, and the fixed fee from premium users has become 2/3 of their revenue. They are still on the red due to heavy network cost, etc.

The chart at the top only gives the ratio of the sales - adding another chart I made to show the sales volume to give you a sense of the business size as well.




On 5/1, DeNA announced their financial report of their Fiscal Year 2009 [ja].

This is the chart showing Mobage-town's sales, membership and PVs which you can see the ratio of sales has changed from last year, membership is growing steadily but PVs are not really growing for the last year or so till this March when it suddenly popped up.




For those of you who wants to see some more info on the latest DeNA fiscal report:
Ads on Mobage-town and game-related sales surged and their quarterly sales exceeded 10 billion yen(approximately 100million USD) for the first time. DeNA is going to focus on charging the games for the next quarter, considering the current state of advertising market in Japan.

Annual sales of the whole company was 37.67 billion yen(up 26%), business profit 15.8billion yen (up 25％). Annual sales of Mobage-town was 19.61 billion yen (up 27%). They made a minimum guaranteed exclusive ad sales contract with D2 Communication and Cyber Communications (CCI) which helped to surge their ad sales (Direct ads 78% / Tie up ads 12% / Ads on search results 10%)

Monthly PV as of of March,2009 is 18.7billion PVs. Item charge within the games within Mobage-town is 100 million yen per month as of March.