24th night at Roppongi Hills, the third Monetize Hacks meeting was held by some web directors from Livedoor and Hatena by welcoming 120 web directors and entrepreneurs in and around Tokyo.
The first monetize Hacks [J] was called for web directors greeting and exchanging ideas around 15 people, the second one [J] was a group competition style with 30 people, now the third one with seminar style is with 120 web people who are keening on how to maximize website monetization in Japanese websphere.
The main theme is “User Billing”. Seven Japanese popular web services directors/leaders made presentations.
1. Yahoo! Japan Research [J] (Asiajin articles)
Researcher of Yahoo! Japan Research Masao Kakihara gave a general view of service monetization strategy.
2. Pixiv (Asiajin articles)
Takanori Katagiri told Pixiv and its monetizing experiences.
Pixiv is now getting a million users, 0.7 bilion page views/month and 15,000 new illustrations per day. 140 servers supports it.
Currently not so profitable (yet). They combine banner ads, contents match(Overture), Amazon affiliate, membership fee (525yen/month).
He also talked how to increase affiliate income by pushing well-sold items heavily.
3. Unoh
Unoh is a 15 people company which is running Photozou(photo sharing), NeoAd(mobile ad), Machi-Tsuku (mobile game). CEO Shintaro Yamada‘s talk was about their new mobile geo-location game Machi-Tsuku monetization. How fixed-rate billing and item-sales systems make difference on sales and user behaviour.
He pointed out how avatar/item charging services (like Gree) are designed carefully not to exchange money and virtual points directly, which is often done in social game sites in west, which seem less successful on profit-wise.
4. Kayac (Asiajin articles)
Yui Tamada, director, Kayac said “No one can predict what service takes off. Small start, get user feedbacks.” They impose themselves to create 99 new services in one year, which results making one service every 2-3 days.
Combination of web application consulting and a lot of original services for selling brand works effectively as free advertising/technology-showcase.
Success stories: Wonderfl (online Flash builder), Koe-bu (voice social network community), Pocket Friend Conti (mobile avatar)
“Make things first, monetization comes later.” “Originality is important.”
(continued to the part 2)
