According to a new paper written by Prof. Philip Sugai and Prof. Donghun Kim, both professors at the International University of Japan, consumers to mobile content are more loyal to those sites than subscribers to the same content accessed through the Internet. In their new paper, entitled “Consumer Loyalty and Willingness to Pay for Service Attributes Across Digital Channels: A Study of the Japanese Digital Content Market,” they explored the dynamics of consumer loyalty to both free and subscription-based content across both the PC and mobile internet.

“The mobile platform has regularly been considered an “inferior” platform to the PC since the launch of mobile data services,” states Prof. Philip Sugai, co-author of this paper, and Director of the Mobile Consumer Lab. “But these results clearly show that this is not the case, especially in terms of one of the key drivers of firm profitability; loyalty.”

This research surveyed more than 400 PC and mobile phone subscribers in Japan, and tested their loyalty by finding out how much they would be willing to pay to remain loyal to their current mobile or PC content sites in light of a series of other competing offers. The loyalty of subscribers to both free content and services such as Yahoo! Japan and subscription-based content such as Disney were each studied, with results clearly showing the power of the mobile platform versus the PC for both.