At Bango, the majority of payments are on the operator bill, with 6% on credit/debit card and less than 1% on PayPal. This may surprise you but let me explain why on-bill is so high for our customers.

Over half of all payments we process are from consumers in the US and UK. In the UK, on-bill payment is mandated by the operators – only when this fails do we offer credit card. As this is a fast, single click experience it makes perfect sense.

In the US, on-bill payment is similarly offered first, with failover to credit card. In the US, however, any over 18 content can’t be put on the subscriber’s bill so credit card is the default.

In other countries where we see payments, this proportion of operator bill/credit card is approximately the same – see this country list on MSearchGroove: http://www.msearchgroove.com/2009/03/03/us-becomes-no-1-mobile-browsing-country/

As you say Martin, all Apple App Stores sales are by credit card. The Bango’s stats reflect businesses that monetize their mobile content and services across a wide demographic – we see little iPhone purchases as spending by iPhone users is restricted to the Apple App Store.

My company has set up an account with Bango for US market trial.

Thanks for the clarification on how you arrived at those numbers. However, I would submit the operators data ARPU would provide a clear indication of usage here regardless of your ability to monitor using in-house analytic tools.

Now sure what you mean by “Japan is still a closed market”.. full http://www. web access has been openly available on all handsets by all operators since the beginning in ‘99. While the on/off deck numbers are not easy to come by, the last public comment by DoCoMo (more than a year ago) suggested less than 1/2 of their page view requests were for i-mode sites. The other two operators, who combined control 50% market share, obviously have their own official menus and would likely see essentially the same type of subscriber activity.

Considering a few other relevant factors:
- Japan has 10% of the population compared to China
- Japanese people tend to read Japanese characters
- There are over 10,000 official content sites for them here

Chetan Sharma has a nice graph in this presentation that shows global operator data ARPU for 2008, see page 21:
http://www.slideshare.net/chetansharma/us-wireless-market-q4-2008-and-2008-update-mar-2009-chetan-sharma-consulting

Note the 3 Japanese operators collected about 20% more revenue – than their 3 U.S counterparts – with less than 1/2 of the subscriber base. Also important to remember, since sms messaging here is basically free, that volume would represent actual ‘pure data’ web surfing!

Hope that helps set the record straight..

Lars