Media Financing

The credit management part of the reading reminds me of the rationale behind investing in the mobile phone message service by portal websites in China shortly after the year of 2000. Since the number of cell phone users has grown rapidly during that time, the portal sites think that asking consumers to pay a small amount of fee for weather forecast, IM, music downloading, playing online games etc will be very profitable. The risk to collect the credit is limited because all the fees are charged instantly through the cell phone bill (In China, people use pre-charged cards instead of service plans to pay the phone service). So far the cell phone message service (included text, images, audio or video) has proved to be the major contributor to portal sites’ revenue.

One recent article on NYT, asked a very interesting question:” How Many Web Services Can One Person Use? It fits into the discussion of “changes in demand”, in which the new media is often regarded as having advantages of generating new demands. But according to this article, it may not necessarily be the case, since ““The biggest chasm is no longer between early adopters and mainstream users. It is about finding and retaining the early adopters to begin with…”. When we are excited about the large number of users of a particular new media, the right question to ask might be: will the number still be the same or grow when another wave of newer media is coming into the market? Or the truth might be “to get someone to use a Web service now you have to get them to replace something else in their life”.