Wireless subscribers can check for news on Asahi's wireless Web page throughout the day. The site is updated every few hours and more often with important breaking news. When subscribers access the site, they see: - Five news headlines from Asahi
- Three sports headlines from Nikkan Sports News
- One daily sports column
- Baseball game results
- Soccer game results
- News briefs in English
When Asahi first began offering the wireless news service, it didn't provide the sports column, says Ohnishi, because "we didn't think people would want to scroll a lot." But subscribers seem to have little problem scrolling for news that interests them, she explains, so Asahi began providing more information. While Asahi's wireless news is making a profit, the company's Web site is losing money. Asahi.com sells about $7 million in advertising each year, but that isn't enough to cover expenses. Asahi representatives would not say how much the site is losing. Yomiuri On-Line is also losing money. The operation has lost about $2.5 million a year for several years. Night and Day Ohnishi also says that there's a big difference in how people use Asahi.com and how they use the wireless Web. For the Web site, peak times are during work hours -- especially the lunch hour -- which means that people access the Web from their office computers and not from home. For the mobile news service, the low point is at 5 a.m., with steady increases until 10 p.m., when it spikes, indicating that younger people -- the 20- to 29-year-olds cruising the video-walled canyons of Tokyo's trendy Shibuya district looking for friends -- are the most frequent users. Like most papers in Japan, Asahi is worried about the country's younger generation. The under-30 set spends almost no time reading newspapers, but spends plenty of money on sports and entertainment news, games and other fun media products. Media spending in Japan increased 50 percent between 1996 and 2001, even in a stagnant economy. The under-30 crowd spends significantly more money on communication than any other age group, and they make up half of Asahi's wireless news subscribers. "We did interviews with college students and found out that they're spending more than the cost of a newspaper subscription on mobile phone service, and don't want to subscribe to newspapers, which cost around $30 a month. One who was spending 20,000 yen (about $130) a month didn't have enough money to buy textbooks," Ohnishi said.
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"We did interviews with college students and found out that they're spending more than the cost of a newspaper subscription on mobile phone service, and don't want to subscribe to newspapers." |
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Asahi did a survey in December that found that more people are using broadband. "It's quite a change from three years ago," when only universities had high-speed access, Ohnishi said.Like most Japanese papers, Asahi managers are wondering what increased broadband use means for them. Should the paper put more content on its site? Should it put less, so that people will subscribe to the paper instead of going online? Should they charge for an online subscription? "We have been asking ourselves if this would be a good opportunity for us," Ohnishi says. "Broadband is spreading, but what kind of content is adequate or how can we make money? At this point, when we ask people what they use broadband for, it's only two types of content: pornography and games." Like many other papers in Japan and around the world, Asahi is losing newspaper subscribers. The business side of the organization blames the Web site and considers the Web a threat to the newspaper's survival. "I'm always getting the complaint that we're losing subscribers because people can read the news for free," says Ohnishi. There's no doubt that Asahi.com will eventually require some type of subscription, she says. "In a couple of years, we'll have to do something."
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