The good folks of Millennial Media gave me a sneak preview of their May Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting (yes, they call it SMART…), which looks at the US mobile advertising market, and then my daughter broke her arm and my blogging activities (and a lot of other things) took a time-out…
Anyway, Millennial reaches 73% of all mobile Internet sites (which they claim makes them biggest), which makes it a fairly comprehensive overview. And there is a lot of interesting data buried in this brief piece of research.
So, for May 2009, the handset on which most ad impressions were recorded was not the iPhone but the Samsung “Instinct” (otherwise known as the SPH-M800). The iPhone was on #2 ahead of the Blackberry Curve. A full list of the handset breakdown looks like this:
On the advertising front, we’re seeing some interesting metrics on cost per engaged user depending on the various measures included. Advertisers appear to be trying out a variety of approaches. Interestingly, the cost per engaged user for a campaign focused on a specific demographic has dropped very significantly (by ¢0.28 or c. 45%). Is this a sign of a higher take-up? Here’s a graph showing the details:
The mix of campaign activities is also interesting and shows that the sector seems to be coming of age. C. 60% of the campaigns (or committed budgets) were dedicated to the mobile web (browser) with the balance using some form of dedicated applications. The app store has its own category already and use of it (or rather iPhone apps) rose by 4 points to an overall 13% of campaigns, which is significantly higher than the iPhone’s footprint. However, I am sure more than 13% of art directors and their clients use iPhones, so maybe this is why. Or of course the iPhone could simply be a device (and the apps to go with it) that makes it easier to engage with users. Oh, what news… 
So here’s the final graph I’ll share with you, namely a chart showing the splits:
Mobile games blogger extraordinaire, Arjan Olsder, provided for a great guest post by Qualcomm games guru Mike Yuen, and it’s well worth a read! Mike addresses this most horrible of issues to mobile game developers that is called fragmentation or, in his words, “[t]he lack of platform and hardware standards continues to be a major inhibitor to mobile game growth in the United States [and elsewhere; ed.]. This diversity in development platforms (Android, BREW, Flash Lite, iPhone, Java, Linux, Symbian, WAP, Windows Mobile) and hardware configurations (display resolutions, RAM/heap memory size, processing and graphics power, audio formats, keypad and other input modes.”
Mike rightly points out that, “[i]n many cases, the costs associated with individualizing software builds to the particularities of each handset, operator and language account for more than half of the overall development budget for new game titles. It’s a simple, but important concept. If fewer resources were diverted to porting a title from handset to handset, operator to operator, more resources could be dedicated to advancing the development of new and innovative gaming concepts.”
He goes on to draw an interesting comparison to the Korean and Japanese markets where there are not as many handsets (and platforms) around and where consumers are more than twice as likely to download mobile games. He then goes on to look at market disruptors like Apple (iPhone anyone?) and others only to conclude, sadly, that “[m]obile gaming is in a state of flux – platform and hardware fragmentation has clouded the once blue sky of gaming’s future and positive disruptive products such as Apple’s iPhone have changed industry perception and consumer expectations about the future of the mobile gaming device. I’m not expecting us to reach consensus anytime soon. Fragmentation is an inherent element of the mobile industry and perhaps always will be.”
Now, is that really so? He is of course right in his analysis of the current environment. But does this really have to be like this? The mobile space suffers from too many very large companies with very large markets. And if this wasn’t enough, there’s two different groups of them, with diverging interests, namely operators (carriers) and handset manufacturers: the former want everyone to be on their network, the latter to be on their handsets. Both are more often than not big old molochs of companies with a lot of market power in their segments. However… the markets seem to gravitate (under consumer demand) towards a more open set-up: operators seem to be accepting the fact that they cannot reign their users into walled gardens forever (more and more resign to flat-rate data and open the mobile web to users) and OEMs seem to realize that they need awesome numbers of users to have a real impact and so most of them gravitate to more open platforms (or, in the case of Nokia, create them).
As most of the newer platforms appear to be based on C++ or siblings thereof (Symbian, UIQ, Linux, Android [yes, I know that they us a JVM], BREW, Win ME, etc), it would appear that a reduced complexity might be nigh. Not as easy as online, mind you, but light at the end of the tunnel nonetheless. And it makes sense as the current fragmentation isn’t really helping anyone: consumers grow frustrated with ever-changing platforms. They want cool content, not a proprietary operator-variant of cool content. Hope, my friends, there is hope!
Here‘s a really good piece of analysis of the landscape of mobile social networks. I will not recount the findings in detail here but they reckon that the Internet biggies Facebook and MySpace rule the mobile social networking world already. MySpace is said to have had 1.4bn visits last month alone. Facebook also is beyond the 1bn mark. Impressive numbers! The largest pure mobile-play, Mocospace, a predominantly US-focussed company, recorded 1bn visits.
The article does mention GoFresh (with their ItsMy service) and Peperonity but fails to point out UK company Yospace who power the combined O2/3UK community.
Whilst the mobile-only players all point out that they’re not worried because their offering was better (“he would say that, wouldn’t he, your Honour?”), but advertising muscle may well be an issue: MySpace recently said that they would expect about half of their total traffic coming from mobile within 5 years, and reaffirmed that mobile is one of the most important strategic initiatives for MySpace. I am sure there will be loads of niches in the sector but the bulk of 1.5bn visits (probably steeply rising) is a tough proposition to beat when it comes to ad revenues!
200m downloads? Who is doing that, you say? Who do you reckon? Zed, Jamba, Thumbplay? No, not them. Getjar, a website featuring free mobile phone downloads (and a logo that cries out for a pro) announced that it recorded 200m downloads in 2 years of operation. See? Users do download content, so where’s your problem? Well… the downloads are not paid for, you see? This makes for a somewhat warped business model…
So, whilst Getjar would certainly appear to prove that consumers are keen to download content and applications to their phones, it does not prove that they would be willing to pay for it. And with mobile advertising sluggish to make a commercially meaningful impact (at least from developers’ point of view) that is somehow not so good really… Better then the Jamba’s et al as they at least make money from it and pay their developers.
Congratulations to the good folks from Getjar anyhow. I hope at least you guys got a good numbers of clicks on your Google apps…
I mean, it’s nothing new as us mobilists knew it all along but now, alas, someone put their finger in the air and quantified it. So here goes: as early as next year, wireless phone users will outnumber landline users by 3 to 1. Impressive, huh?
Some more somewhat obvious findings are: rich nations are running out of non-users, and in some emerging markets, where rising personal incomes have made wireless affordable, that gap closes quickly, too. Even so, only half the world’s population uses mobile phones now. Most subscriber growth over the next five years will quite naturally come from India, China, parts of Asia, and Africa. I think the author might have forgotten Brazil…
And now, dear content lovers, comes the candy: the analysts say that “[f]irms must boost their average monthly revenue per user, or ARPU. Text-messaging has been the biggest moneymaker, along with ring tones and games. Music and video downloads are starting to catch on”. By 2011, U.S. carriers will garner 35% of service revenue from data products, more than twice the 2007 share, says the Telecommunications Industry Association.
But in emerging markets, non-voice services are growing, too: “Wireless companies need to evolve their business models because of the changing nature of the industry, not just penetration levels,” said Sureyya Ciliv, chief executive of Turkcell. “Communication and information technologies are converging globally.
Our recently very acquisitive friends from Oberon Media struck again to create one of the first truly focussed triple-play gaming houses. They now acquired Pixelplay, one of the giants on the interactive TV (iTV) sector. This together with their own online activities (Oberon powers e.g. MSN Games) and their recent acquisitions of Blaze and I-Play creates a rather explosive mix.
It will be interesting to see how they will manage to consolidate the whole thing with a view to the – at this time – still somewhat disparate portfolio: Pixelplay boasts the iTV licenses for the likes of Monopoly, Luxor, the World Poker Tour, etc, whilst I-Play excelled inter alia with “The Fast and the Furious“. Oberon’s ability to exploit titles now across three platforms may well give it some edge in the market, which – arguably – all the single parts urgently needed.
The move shows an impressively stringent move on the part of Oberon into building a casual-games-focussed powerhouse that extends its strengths across the three main consumer screens of today, i.e. the computer, the TV and the mobile phone.
YouTube appears to have put its mobile site live: under http://m.youtube.com/ you now get a slimmed-down version of the YouTube service. However, that’s about it. The site starts with a warning: “YouTube Mobile is a data intensive application. We highly recommend that you upgrade to an unlimited data plan with your mobile service provider to avoid additional charges.” I see, OK, well, why didn’t you adapt this more appropriately then? Isn’t this somewhat scary???
What follows is clips varying in length (tonight, there were 2 with more than 4 minutes length in the top 10). A couple of categories (highest rated, newly added, etc – in short: the usual suspects) but absolutely nothing that would suggest a specifically mobile offering. I find this rather disappointing. Shouldn’t we be able to expect more when “two kings have gotten together“?
So what is this? Don’t they understand mobile? Didn’t they have enough time to study this during their Verizon exclusive that now expired? Do they not have the resource to design their mobile service so as to provide more than a simple extension of their existing site into mobile (but without the functionalities the online version has)? The WAP offering lacks the very features and navigation, etc that arguably contributed so much to YouTube’s success. They’ll have to up the ante drastically to get going on the small screen, too. This doesn’t cut it!
