Japanese customers will have a greater choice of manga on cell phones available from Sony; and why that might matter to site publishers.
While listening to my fellow writers grouse about tiny cell phone screens and the readability of mobile content, I found a story posted to the International Herald Tribune about Sony Pictures Entertainment. They plan to nearly triple the number of comic books, or “manga,” available for the mobile handset market.
Customers will pay the equivalent of $2.86 for five titles per month. The medium is so popular that Sony’s move will give it a number of titles equal to the combined total of its top two rivals in the market.
A story with limited appeal to the SEO crowd, some might think. But there are two good lessons here for site owners. One deals with content. If your content is authoritative/entertaining/compelling, people will look for it, and if it’s good enough, they’ll pay (ie, convert from visitor to customer) for the privilege to get it.
The other concerns outlets where users find your content. The vast majority will find Internet content via a PC, running Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. That’s the focus today. For manga publishers, the outlet was the newsstand. It has made a move toward the Internet, and beyond that to people’s PCs, and now their pockets.
You can be an effective business today. It’s probably too soon to worry about small screens and content formats for most site publishers. But all the wireless buzzwords floating around will coalesce into standards, and from standards to deployment. A cell phone plan that costs $40 per month for voice usage today may include data in 2008. Or even 2007.
Have you considered that your customer today could be your storefront tomorrow?
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
