Recruit (on Asiajin) announced their R25’s mobile site shutdown on July 30th.
(Mobile version of R25 has not been closed yet but may give you an error page. It seems to limit visitors by browser user agent and/or IP address, which is common to Japanese mobile sites. The PC site is here [J].)
Their PR answered to ITMedia [J] that this is because more advertisers want PC ads than mobile sites.
R25 started as a free weekly magazine in greater Tokyo for young train commuters since July 2004 and distributed 550,000 copies every week [J]. They also have a website and both the PC and the cellphone sites were renewed last year.
According to them, the mobile version of R25 is getting 130 million page views per month, which is not bad and as they continue the PC site they keep creating contents anyway. It sounds strange to give it up like this, but Recruit sometimes stops businesses which seemed promising from outside in their history.
Would love to see the budgeting behind this decision. Could they really not monetize 130 million PVs enough to justify the cost of running the site?
From my experience using the feature rich site, it did seem that they were licensing other services (such as news sources or train route planners) which could have been expensive. If they weren’t licensing then I’m sure that these were expensive to develop and maintain.
Given that such a media savvy company with a huge sales force in a mature mobile market could not succeed in this area, it does raise questions for any company looking to monetize mobile eyeballs.