DeNA owns Japan’s most popular mobile portal site, “Mobaga Town”, and their stock is falling rapidly for the past several weeks.

Late last year, Japanese government put out a statement requesting all the mobile service providers to use a filtering system to stop children under 18 to access certain sites*. And, in early December, Japanese Telecommunications Carriers Association and the service providers such as KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank and Wilcom have agreed to set up the filtering against all of their users under 18 as a default.

40% of Mobaga Town users are teenagers. With the filtering system set by these mobile service providers, teenagers won’t be able to access the site anymore, even though DeNA has been taking serious measures to ensure the safety of young users. I’m sure that the filtering system will be improved in future to have more flexibility, but for now, it will cause not only NeNA, but also other mobile sites some financial issues.

*In addition to adult sites and gambling sites, SNS sites are on the black list.