Comments (2)

By TaiTran, December 15, 2011 12:24 pm

Market size?

Fresh market.

Challenges

1. Piracy
2. User habit
3. Underdeveloped e-payment system. Currently, most e-payment is done through SMS. Content providers share 50-55% upfront revenue with telecommunication service providers

The Pioneers

1. Alezaa.com
2. VCCorp
3. VTC Online confirmed the intention
4. Publishers including FirstNews, Alpha Book, Youth Publisher
5. Lac Viet

A few players have expressed their intention to join the market. More update when their intentions have materialized and publicized.

Show me the money

I have just personally brainstormed a few ideas how players would workaround the challenges and elicit money from buyers

1. Target impulse buying demand
2. Provide convenience for mobile device holders
3. Provide a complete hi-end experience for smart phone holders – good content to go with good hardware
4. The long tail where pirates don’t bother pirating
5. Work with academic institutions to educate and/or coerce students into consuming the contents. Alezaa is deploying this

What categories?

1. Manga!
2. English textbooks
3. Chick lit

Show me MORE money

How to earn enough to be profitable?

I’m using Amazon for a case study

1. Selling Kindles at subsidy to create the platform for content consumption
2. Technology-powered automation to control scaling cost, and to serve the long tail
3. Large scale (one million titles as at December 2011) for network effect which leads to market domination which leads to revenue
4. Use bargain power to drive down costs from suppliers
5. Backward integration to cut the costs from suppliers

Image courtesy: Tiendq