“To be On-deck or Off-deck? That is the question…”

Recently I have been pondering the exponential growth of the mobile market here in Japan. It’s one of those things that if you think about for too long it can really excite you or scare you depending on your nature and your inherent love or hate towards technology. The number of changes on the way in terms of the way we currently live and structure our lives are undoubtedly many. I personally get very excited by this and the opportunities that are surely to abound. As do a number of mobile support marketing and mobile CRM software/application companies I am sure. To get a good taste of this, one need not look much further than what is happening on the streets of Seoul or Tokyo. Those two particular cities have their fair share of early adopters which are leading the way towards what you and I may soon be doing with our keitai’s in a new way a year from now.
As I thought about this topic a little more and here in Japan in particular I was struck by a bit of a dilemma for new start-up mobile application based companies who wish to tap this market and enter this frenzied game with a mobile based website. Those companies have a big decision to make between creating a site on-deck versus off-deck. For those of you unfamiliar with the terminology, on-deck simply refers to registering one’s site with an official carrier and having the site listed as part of their official line up. Off-deck site creation is the foregoing of this formal registration and simply creating your site on the mobile web. The differences are huge and something I would like to partially explore in this blog entry.
From past research and calls made to both carriers and companies specializing in the creation of off-deck sites I came across a number of distinguishing differences. Below are some of the highlighted differences:

Time and Costs: On deck sites require individual formal registration across each operator with separate fees. These costs on the cheaper end can run upwards of 3 to 5 million yen for a basic mobile site along with the formal registration costs. Not to mention the lengthy time needed for the site to be evaluated and approved. Off-deck on the other hand can be thrown up as fast as you can put it together for as cheap as you wish pending your site development needs.

PV`s: At this point according to calls made to leading mobile site development companies like Infinitia on deck sites offer high reliability and thus higher PV`s due to the inherent formalities of registering the site. Also if your company requires formal payment and bill collection the carriers can also do this for you. That aspect alone definitely makes a difference and knocks down a huge barrier between you and your customer. As we all know trust issues are huge in business however I would like to add that this factor can be especially important here in Japan.

On the other hand, nowadays the youth in Japan are beginning to initiate their searches off deck and by-passing the operators. Already, Japanese teens 13-19 prefer searching using mobile search in 70.1% of cases versus official mobile carrier listings in 47.1%. (Source: CNET Japan, May 2007) One can only assume that this trend will accelerate with internet search engine giant Google entering the mobile world here in Japan recently.

Future Trends: With the sheer numbers of off-deck sites versus on-deck one is inclined to think that the future of these walled gardens offered by operators will soon be a thing of the past. Looking at Docomo's i-Mode and we are already seeing a shift. Roughly 70% of the traffic is moving off-deck with 30% staying on. (Source: Infinitia--Japan Case Study: Mobile 2.0 and the Next Generation of of Mobile Appplications) Now If history has much to say about this along with current trends on both the web and mobile web this is a distinct possibility. The question for many is when of course.

So looking at but a few of these comparisons, one can see that there are distinct structural, technical and operational differences between both on and off deck sites. It must be noted that the list I have created here is certainly not exhaustive as issues of operator filtering amongst other key issues are not examined. But for the purpose of this exercise I thought those highlighted points I noted do illustrate some fairly major issues faced by start-ups who wish to enhance or add a layer to their CRM image or best practices.

The questions I suppose for a lot of these start-ups are what are their goals? What type of site is needed? Who is the site targeted at? How long will their site take to develop a loyal following? These answers which can be garnered from one’s business plan can go along ways towards really simplifying and making seemingly difficult dilemmas very straightforward. I invite others thoughts on this topic!

Canadian Chris