Summary of Research Findings

The digital content market in this research refers to the market for online services in general, available via smartphones or PCs, which has widespread to various fields.

The social media market is brisk, because, in addition to wider use of social media among businesses, municipality, political parties and politicians partly for information delivery and promotions, increasing numbers of companies have started using influencer-related services for marketing support geared to enterprises.

Without any resale-price maintenance system (i.e., the system that the book price is determined by publishers and retailers and bookshops sell books at the fixed price) that exists for printed media, e-books can be sold more freely, offering price reductions and free promotions by working with publishers. While a publisher is said to have two opportunities to strategically promote printed books, when the book is published for the first time and when the book is developed into movie or other media, there are more opportunities for e-books to be strategically promoted, with the sales methods having various potential.

Video streaming has now become a part of daily lives, because of the corona crisis having held people at home, increasing the video viewing hours, and because of increase in subscribers taking account of exclusive or original contents offered by each of video streaming subscription service providers. There is more room for the video streaming market to expand, as 5G service infrastructure improvement and penetration of 5G-support devices.

As consumers have started using subscription services for music streaming in combination with widespread smartphones, which is synergized by the artists who have proactively streamed their music as well as videos on the free video platforms to escape from inability to go on live tours amid the corona crisis, music streaming subscription services provided online have been well in demand.

Online advertisement has shown marked growth in video ads on the web, especially instream video ads, displayed within the contents of video streaming sites and apps, have shown dramatical increase in the numbers produced. As the presence of advertisement on social media has also becoming stronger year by year, the stable growth is expected to continue for the future.

In the game market, expansion of subscribed games has attracted attention. Game contents have diversified during competition, but consumers find it difficult to purchase a number of various types of games in terms of expenses. Users of game subscription services enjoy the convenience of being able to download or stream the title they want whenever possible, and the cost efficiency every time they increase the number of titles and times they play, when compared to purchasing of games multiple of times. The corona crisis has not only spurred the sales growth of games downloaded but also subscribed games.

Noteworthy Topics

The NFT Market

After continuous soar during 2021 and 2022 followed by a slowdown in the latter half of 2022, the NFT (Non-Fungible Token) market has currently shrunk. Some say in the industry that the phenomenon has occurred because of stagnant economic activities during the corona crisis having caused an influx of speculative money to the market. Nevertheless, NFT has started to equip with practical functions in various fields in 2023.

On the other hand, however, it still has no clear legal framework. Therefore, when making any business activities, each of individual activities need to be contemplate in concrete from the legal and copyright aspects. In addition, when no expertise in the technological point of view, the entry barriers are quite strong. For companies and individuals to enter the NFT market, they need to confront and solve these challenges, while the environment should be prepared from the legal as well as the technological viewpoints.

*A non-fungible token (NFT) is “the digital datafile equipped with tamper-proof certificate of authenticity as well as proof of ownership” and are issued and traded on blockchain.

Research Outline