July 26, 2006 at 8:07 am
· Filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Industry, Skweezer Ads
I’m shaking my head while reading this CNET article where the EC and its Operators have to work out whether or not advertising should be allowed in the mobile space.
Hmmm. With declining voice revenues, high churn, improbable video projections, threats from VoIP/WiMAX, and general “where-do-we-start syndrome”… how else will Operators be profitable in the coming years? From emerging markets? Where revenue will be a fraction of the UK and French currencies? Right now, you could launch the coolest data service imaginable in Chad, and end-up having little to show for it.
I think the answer is obvious, especially when leveraging an offer-engine like Advertizer™, where mobile users are locating information with an intent to consume.
Posted by Kevin Perkins
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July 24, 2006 at 3:55 pm
· Filed under Mobile Industry
Russia’s largest mobile operator (MTS) has stopped investing in any new i-mode-related services until September.
MTS’ spokesman Kirill Alyavdin said the company’s failure to meet its target was due “to a lack of interesting, advanced mobile handsets supporting i-mode.”
i-mode was one of the O.G. data platforms from Japan (1999) with a web-like mark-up language called c-HTML to display web content in handsets. The service also included a mail client.
With MTS having about 48 million users in Russia (as of June 30), the 100k or so subscribers represents a little over 0.2% of their subs at an estimated cost of $20MM US annually. In other words, their i-mode users will have to consume $200 of data services in a year—to just break even.
Not exactly good economics if you can get the regular internet for free on a majority of handsets using a technology like, oh I don’t know, Skweezer?
Posted by Kevin Perkins
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July 24, 2006 at 7:30 am
· Filed under Mobile Industry
I had my misgivings about ESPN Mobile’s service some time ago. Since then, things haven’t gone so well for them, unfortunately. I really mean “unfortunately” because I’d like to see data services do better in America, really. Rising tide and all that.
While reading the news on this, I found a really good writeup on MVNO math by Julie Ask, a JupiterResearch analyst, describing how small this market really is. I have since subscribed to the Wireless section of the JupiterResearch weblogs. Good stuff.
Posted by Barnabas Kendall
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