TOKYO, JAPAN, 1999 JAN 21 (NB) -- By Martyn Williams, Newsbytes. AOL
Japan, the online service established by America Online Inc.
[NYSE:AOL], Mitsui & Co. Ltd. and Nihon Keizai Shimbun Inc., says
it saw subscriptions surge in the last three months of 1998 to push
total membership past 200,000 in the new year.
The online service says it signed up its two millionth member on
January 7 after seeing subscriptions jump from 150,000 at the
beginning of October. The strong performance was largely thanks to
a very successful December for the company, when it saw 27,000 new
members join. AOL Japan began the current fiscal year, in April 1998,
with 100,000 subscribers.
An AOL spokesperson told Newsbytes the service cannot tie down the
strong jump in subscribers to any event or promotion in particular
but feels they are benefiting from a jump in the sales of personal
computers.
"Sales of PC have been going really, really well. A lot of people
seem to be putting off buying new cars or taking foreign vacations
and are buying PCs instead. AOL software is bundled with a lot of
manufacturers and we are benefiting from this," she said. "We haven't
changed our strategy."
The latest membership figures were announced as the company unveiled
the Japanese version of its new AOL 4.0 software. Users can download
the new software from February at the company's home page at
jp.aol.com . Existing members will be sent the software, the
company said.
AOL Japan also revealed some of the finding of an online questionnaire
recently sent to users. Among the findings, the majority of users
are beginners when it comes to the Internet with 61.1 percent being
online less than one year. When responses from male and female users
are examined, the survey found a larger percentage of women than men
were newcomers. Of women respondents, 68.7 percent have been online
less than one year while 56.9 percent of men reported being newcomers
to the Internet.
The survey also found that, despite the partial ownership of AOL Japan
by Nikkei, Japan's largest business information publisher, use of
AOL in business is still very small. Some 94.6 percent of users access
AOL from home and only 4.0 percent from companies but users are online
often, with 54.3 percent of users reporting they access the service
everyday. Among female users, a larger percentage, around 62.0
percent, access daily.
The ability to create more than one screen-name is also popular with
AOL Japan users. Of respondents to the survey, 48.6 percent report
having one or more screen names. AOL offers users up to five
screen-names so they can maintain different identities for private,
public, message-board and chat services. Some of the multiple
screen-names are also used to help different users share a single
account. AOL said 30 percent of accounts had more than one user.
Still, despite the heavy use by women on AOL, the service membership
base is still largely male. The company said 31.3 percent of members
are female and they have an average age of 29.4 years. Among male
users, the average age is 33.1 years.
Encouraged by the growing number of female users and their attractive
usage profile, the online service recently began a campaign targeted
at women (Newsbytes, December 29, 1998).
To conduct the survey, AOL sent out an online questionnaire and
accepted responses from January 9 to January 17. It received 14,774
responses. |
