mjelly mobile 2.0 blog

admob price drop - lower cost mobile inventory

Admob recently announced a big price drop on certain bits of inventory.  As the biggest player in the mobile advertising industry admob's pricing really makes a big difference to the market overall.  The reduction in costs for certain ads potentially opens up the market for PPC arbitrage in mobile for people using mobile affiliate marketing or other mobile advertising networks.  Also the drop in iphone advertising prices in particular might open up opportunities for iphone developers looking for a way of promoting their app.

For publishers running admob's ads this is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, fill rates for inventory have skyrocketed after being at a very low level earlier this year.  On the other hand, higher fill rates come at the cost of a lower eCPM.  It may be that admob is lowering its prices as publishers are starting to use mobile ad network aggregators and their own ad servers to push in inventory from other mobile ad networks to make up the gap left by admob's higher prices. 

The details of the price cuts are below:

iphone ads

For iPhone ads targeting all United States traffic (i.e., all US with no further targeting options selected), the minimum bid will decrease from $0.10 to $0.05.

Ads targeting specific carriers
The minimum bid for targeting for big 4 US carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile & Verizon) will remain unchanged, ranging from $0.11 - $0.15.  The minimum bid for targeting for all other carriers will decrease from between $0.11 - $0.15 to $0.05.

Ads targeting all countries and carriers
For non-iPhone ads targeting all countries and carriers (i.e., no further targeting options selected), the minimum bid will decrease from $0.03 to $0.01.

Mobile web statistics

Some new mobile web statistics out there

Bango has released some data based on its payment system showing that the US is now the major driver of mobile web traffic across its platform http://news.bango.com/2009/03/12/us-tops-mobile-web-browsing-and-spending-charts/ 

Opera released their monthly state of the mobile web report http://www.opera.com/smw/2009/01/ which has some great info on the top sites in various countries

ABI Research also has a new study out showing 7% growth in mobile web usage http://www.abiresearch.com/press/1377-Mobile+Internet+Search+Engine+Use+Jumped+14%25+Between+2007+and+2008

Emarketeer has a report out on the UK mobile internet market showing that it is finally starting to grow ... http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=emarketer_2000555

Admob's mobile metrics report for January is also out http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics

Also check out our previous post on sources of mobile internet statistics

Mobamingle - Mobile Gametown comes to the US and Europe

Mobamingle recently launched in the US and Europe as the international version of the smash hit Japanese Mososo service Mobile Gametown or Mobagetown.  Mobamingle is available at m.mbmgl.com and is really going to have a big impact - all the other mobile social networks are going to have to raise their game to compete.

We recently covered mbmgl over at Mobile Industry Review.  The key highlights of the Japanese version of the service:

• 10m plus users
• 15 bn monthly page views
• $200m in annual revenues
  

If the company behind mobamingle Dena can repeat their success outside of Japan it will be good for everyone in mobile.  They are an amazing company who have pioneered things like mobile affiliate marketing and mobile auctions in Japan. 

Go read the full post over at Mobile Industry Review. 

Dennis at Wap Review also did a typically brilliant review of the site here

mbmgl on mjelly (PC)

mbmgl on mjelly (mobile)

Mobile 2.0 Startups nominated for Mobile Monday awards

Rudy from mtrends pinged me to say that the nominees for the MobileMonday Peer Awards have been whittled down from 163 to 42 by the mobilemonday chapters around the world.  An international Jury will now select the 20 finalists to present at the Peer Awards event in Barcelona. These finalists chosen to present in Barcelona will be announced on January 26.

Great to see that quite a few of the nominees are already in the mjelly directory including:

• fring - (MobileMonday Tel Aviv)

• mobiSiteGalore - (MobileMonday Chennai)

• MocoSpace - (Mobile Monday Boston)
• Nimbuzz - (Mobile Monday Amsterdam)
• Xumii - MobileMonday Sydney

Here's the full list:

    * 7syntax - MobileMonday Portugal

    * Addict Digital Media - Mobile Monday Buenos Aires

    * aka-aki networks GmbH - MobileMonday Berlin

    * Anaeko - MobileMonday Belfast

    * Aradiom - MobileMonday Istanbul

    * Babajob.com - MobileMonday Bangalore

    * Beabloo - MobileMonday Barcelona

    * Big in Japan Inc. - MobileMonday Dallas

    * bioLocate - MobileMonday Jakarta

    * CIDWAY - MobileMonday Geneva

    * Cirius Technologies, Inc. - MobileMonday Los Angeles

    * Crave Mobile - MobileMonday Philadelphia

    * Creador Estudio Interactivo C.A. - MobileMonday Caracas

    * Dial2Do - MobileMonday Dublin

    * Dialy - Mobile Monday Maroc

    * DPGroup >> Product: SINDYK - MobileMonday Bogota

    * Fortumo - MobileMonday Estonia

    * fring - MobileMonday Tel Aviv

    * Getjar Networks - MobileMonday Lithuania

    * iKen Solutions - MobileMonday Mumbai

    * Keynetik - MobileMonday Washington DC

    * Liquid Air Lab GmbH / adplace.com - MobileMonday Frankfurt

    * Mob4Hire - MobileMonday Vancouver

    * Mobintech A/S - MobileMonday Copenhagen

    * mobiSiteGalore - MobileMonday Chennai

    * MocoSpace - Mobile Monday Boston

    * Nimbuzz B.V. - Mobile Monday Amsterdam

    * Orbster GmbH - MobileMonday Munich

    * Oxynade - MobileMonday Brussels

    * Palringo - MobileMonday London

    * rmbrME - MobileMonday New York

    * Secusmart GmbH - MobileMonday Dusseldorf

    * Smaato Inc. - MobileMonday Hamburg

    * Soonr - MobileMonday Silicon Valley

    * Tellmewhere - MobileMonday Paris

    * Unkasoft Advergaming - MobileMonday Madrid

    * Wapalta - MobileMonday St. Petersburg

    * Wapja.net - MobileMonday Sao Paulo

    * WorldMate, Inc. - MobileMonday Atlanta

    * Xumii - MobileMonday Sydney

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ebuddy hits 11m downloads of its Java app

 

ebuddy just announced that they have reached 11m downloads of their mobile application.  The service lets you log into your IM accounts like AIM, Googletalk, MSN Messenger and ICQ as well as the Facebook and Myspace social networks. 

This is pretty stunning when you consider that this has all been achieved with very limited use of the iphone app store.  ebuddy has been really effective at using mobile viral marketing tactics, word of mouth and the strength of its product to get traction without spending large sums on advertising

I recently profiled ebuddy over at Mobile Industry Review - so head over to read it. 

Here are the key stats:

- 11m downloads of the ebuddy mobile software, growing at 1m downloads per month

- average user logs in 30 times a month

- 3m monthly visitors on mobile, growing 195% a year (2004 to 2008)

- processed 45bn messages in 2008

- In some markets, such as Indonesia, eBuddy's mobile traffic is 2-3 times its web traffic

- PSP, iphone touch are fast growing platforms not just mobile phones

 

ebuddy are an amazing mobile success story ! Dont forget to read the full profile over at mobile industry review.

ebuddy in the mjelly directory

eBuddy mobile messenger (java app)

eBuddy download on mjelly (PC)

eBuddy download on mjelly (mobile)

eBuddy Lite Messenger (mobile web app)

Find eBuddy Lite on mjelly (PC)

Find eBuddy Lite on mjelly (mobile)

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Mobile Marketing Agencies

Check out our updated mobile marketing and advertising agencies list which includes all the latest 2012 mobile advertising and marketing agencies in the UK/ London, US (New York, San Fransisco) and more! 

Over the last five years there's been a massive boom in mobile marketing and mobile advertising which has lead to a load of new mobile marketing agencies emerging.  Of course the big generalist and digital agencies are also moving into this area now as well, by developing their own mobile-focused teams or mobile-specific units and buying up some of the independent agencies.  There are lots of differences between the different types of agencies in terms of their scale, their overall approach to mobile marketing, the types of services they focus on and the types of clients they focus on. 

I've put together a quick list of some of the mobile marketing agencies out there at the moment - it's a pretty UK/ London specific at the moment, however, if people have suggestions for others on the list shout in the comments and we will add them in.  

Hopefully this will be useful to anyone looking for a mobile marketing agency or wanting to understand more about the different types of services on offer. 

Mobile Marketing Agencies

Welovemobile - take a creative approach to mobile marketing and also do a lot of mobile user experience work alongside strategy and planning, media buying, technical implementation etc  Clients include application and software providers like EQO and Mobiluck, mainstream organisations like CIMA, record labels, media companies and mobile operators.  Having met with the guys at welovemobile a few times I can tell you that they are incredibly knowledgable and passionate about mobile and have a great range of skills in the team there. 

Fetch Media (www.fetchmedia.co.uk) is the full service mobile agency, experienced in strategy to media planning and buying. Most campaigns evolve around the mobile internet however Fetch also include more traditional forms of mobile marketing such as SMS into their campaigns. Fetch recognise the importance of integrating mobile into a cross-media marketing campaign and are experts at moving companies into the mobile advertising space. Companies looking to expand their mobile advertising presence to the next level or to try mobile for the first time should get in touch.

Ringring Media - focus on mobile ad planning and buying - they manage campaigns using multiple ad networks, mobile search and on-portal ads which allows them to optimize spend and gain advantages from buying inventory in bulk.  You could compare Ringring media to one of the online search agencies like Latitude.  They also run an ad server for publishers that aggregates all the major ad networks in order to increase fill rates and click rates. Ringring media are the ideal agency for anyone who is spending significant amounts on mobile ad or search campaigns and wants to get more for their money and improve conversion rates - recommended.

Incentivated - works across mobile marketing in a range of areas (e.g. from mobile customer relationship management to mobile advertising) and designs, builds and host technical solutions, manages marketing campaigns and does general consulting.  They work for a lot of blue-chip businesses like British Airways, the CIO, Hilton Group, Masterfoods, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Scottish Power, Transport for London and VisitBritain. 

Marvellous Mobile - these guys were acquired by the large agency Aegis in mid-2007 and were around pretty early in the day (founded in 2002).  They are now present in quite a few locations including London, Amsterdam, New York and Paris.  Its a full service agency and they work for all the big brands like Coke, Guinness and so on. 

Inside Mobile - another full service agency working across mobile research and consulting to media buying and planning.  Clients include Reebok, Adidas, Discovery Networks and HSBC. 

Candyspace Media - Candyspace is a full service mobile marketing agency with offices in London and New York.  They do a lot of work for film, music, technology and games companies like Microsoft Xbox, Sega, Samsung etc.  Canyspace have particular expertise in building branded portals, for example, they built the Skins mobile site for Channel 4. I know Candyspace well and they are nice people who really understand how to build creative and effective mobile marketing campaigns and solutions. 

Beep Marketing -  is run by Helen Keegan of Mobile Monday London and blogger at Musing of a Mobile Marketeer.  Helen does everything from consultancy projects, to the nitty gritty of campaign management as well as training and events.  The types of clients range from Vivendi Universal Publishing to Transport for London to Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and Arcadia.  Helen has a massive amount of experience in mobile marketing and a really good view on how to implement campaigns effectively across the full user-experience path - something that a lot of big agencies seem to really struggle with!

Que Pasa - these guys have been around for a long time in the world of mobile and are best known for running mobile portals for Channel 4 and Virgin Mobile.  In terms of mobile marketing they focus on producing branded content and developing mobile sites for brands including Nike and Orion books. 

 

Sponge - these guys run their own mobile applications platform that powers services like "text to win" competitions, IVR services and the like.  However, they also do mobile marketing consultancy. 

 

Ipsh! - a US agency that was bought by Omnicom - they are mainly based in San Fransisco and New York but I believe they also work in Europe and the UK through an affiliate. 

Update #1 - some suggestions in the comments:

 

The Hyper Factory - full service agency which is active in a lot of markets outside of Europe e.g. New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hyderabad.  They work for a lot of the big brands e.g. Toyota, Nike, BlackBerry, Coke and Adidas

Mobile One2One - Spanish Agency but also seems to be doing some UK campaigns e.g. for Nokia Mosh

update #2 - another suggestion in the comments

 

UserAdgents is based in Paris and focuses on "using mobile as a tool to drive traffic in mobile + web + high street stores through mobile advertising & direct marketing campaigns".  It was setup by a WPP subsidiary.  France is surprisingly advanced in a lot of areas of mobile internet so these guys are worth checking out.  

Update 3

YOC Group

The YOC Group is a full service provider of advertising, information and transaction services for mobile phones. Although based in Berlin, YOC recently launched a UK office in London and works for international brands, media houses, Internet portals, mobile phone service providers and financial service providers. The YOC Group offers three business areas: mobile marketing, affiliate marketing, and mobile B2C services. Clients include: Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Nike, Kraft Foods, Walt Disney Studio Motion Pictures, BILD, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Gruner + Jahr, IDG Media, Prisma Presse, Accuweather, Teletext and 123play.com. 

Right that's it for now - pleased to hear about any others you think we should add to the list. 

Itsmy.com - a mobile 2.0 service building something really special

We recently profiled Itsmy.com over at Mobile Industry Review, based on an interview carried out with Vince Stable the CEO and his CTO Jukka. 

Some of the key highlights:

• itsmy are building for the long-term - they don't really run any ads from ringtone companies or use ad networks that much in favour of developing their own direct relationships with advertisers like Reebok to offer bespoke mobile advertising solutions like sponsorship and so on


• they are making massive use of data to understand their audience, and can track individual users over time across their site to a very fine degree


• there is evidence of a MASSIVE BOOM building in mobile internet off the back of flat rate data plans - all of itsmy.com's evidence points to usage exploding when networks launch cheap data packages


• mobile-only services like itsmy.com are thriving even as sites like facebook develop their own mobile sites

• they are investing heavily in their platform in terms of moderation, to keep the service safe and through localisation technology to allow them to cover different European markets

• they aren't targeting some of the hyper growth mobile markets like Indonesia and India, rather they are focusing on the US and Europe (apparently they actually block some countries from accessing the service)

It's great to see a mobile 2.0 company like itsmy making a long-term investment rather than going for a quick buck - a real contrast from the likes of Jamster and Monstermob who gave mobile 1.0 such a bad name.

You can go read the full post over at Mobile Industry Review.

itsmy.com on mjelly

itsmy.com on mjelly

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Apple iphone app store TV ads show how to advertise new mobile services

At the last Mobile Monday London, Dan Applequist mentioned that Apple had started advertising the iphone app store in the US, with a screen by screen demo of how to download an app onto your phone.  The point he made was that Apple are very successfully presenting this as a "new thing" and a lot of people will think that they invented the idea of downloadable mobile applications and software, despite the fact that this capability has existed for years on Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, not to mention Palms, Blackberries and handsets with Java and Brew built in. 

Here is the TV ad "Vicinity" which is also showing in the UK now and probably all the other countries the iphone is available in.  

What is amazing is that in all the years downloadable applications have been available, no other company has every promoted them in this way and made the process easy to understand for the mass market of consumers.  The ad focuses on the device and actually shows you the process of downloading an app.  If you look back at the way 3G services and portals have been advertised by the big mobile operators they almost never do this - the ad may show a specific thing you can do with the phone but the whole thing is tied up in a glossy TV ad as if they are almost ashamed of showing the device.  See this one for example for Vodafone Live! in Greece:

This says it all really - a mobile ad that gives you virtually no idea what its about, and does not provide any value to the view in terms of user education etc.  I could post a whole load of similar commercials featuring David Beckham, cool music and good looking young people but never telling you what you can do with your phone or helping you to use it. 

There are loads of great apps Symbian and Windows Mobile devices such as Shozu, Opera Mini and Mig33 but at the moment its only really the early adopters and consumers in developing markets that are using them.  If T-Mobile ever gets its own app store off the ground let's see if they can advertise it the same way as Apple or whether they a) dont bother to advertise it or b) do a load of adverts with celebrities and pretty cinematography rather than a clear and useful demo of the service. 

Bango analytics upgrade - track visitors on mobile

So a while back I wrote a post about options for mobile analytics.   At the time Bango had launched with a fairly limited product which allowed you to track visitors through a link created through their service, which was effective at tracking link exchanges, mobile ads and so on.  Bango have now significantly upgraded this service and it has to be said it absolutely rocks! 

The main change is that they have added a page tracking link, a bit like the service offered by wapalizer.  However, Bango's service is a lot better in a number of respects:

• It not only tracks page views, but also tracks unique visitors, which wapalizer does not
• The user interface is a lot better than wapalizer and you can easily navigage around the different views e.g. weekly, daily, monthly 
• There are lots of good breakdowns of the data by handset, country etc

Anyway - well worth checking out ... http://bango.com/products/analytics/default.aspx

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Why better mobile browsers do not mean the end of mobile-specific websites

There is a growing view that the mobile internet is essentially going to mean accessing existing web sites on your mobile phone, rather than sites specifically built for or formatted for mobile.  This idea has been around for a while, but has been given a shot in the arm by the launch of the iphone and its integrated Safari browser, which is shown in TV adverts browsing the "normal" internet. 

There are a number of other recent trends which suggest that idea of a "mobile internet" like the imode system they have in Japan is not going to happen in the West. Google has stopped prioritizing mobile sites on its mobile search engine, in favour of transcoded versions of web sites.  Opera mini, which has a similar level of capability as the iphone browser but for other phones now focuses on linking to the PC versions of websites such as The Guardian, Myspace and Facebook from its home-page. 

Over the last year, Vodafone and a boat load of other operators have begun rolling out transcoders onto their networks to allow their users to access PC-focused websites, and in the process completely screwing over anyone that had previously bothered to build a mobile-focused site. 

There is no doubt that a large proportion of mobile internet usage going forward is going to be generated by people accessing the main PC web on their mobile handsets.  For a lot of use cases there is no need to have a specialised mobile site, particularly when you have a good mobile browser.  In addition, users who have particular sites they use on their PCs are going to look for the same thing on the mobile web.  Every day I access PC websites on my mobile handset and it works just fine. 

However, going forward, there is still going to be a big role for both for specific mobile versions of PC websites as well as mobile "native" sites (sites that only exist on the mobile web).  A lot of people don't seem to accept this at the moment but the evidence is there if you look for it.  The fact is that a mobile site that is specifically designed for accessing on mobile provides a better user-experience than a site made for a PC on a tiny screen (even if your browser has whizzy features like zooming). 

Despite the move towards trying to compress PC websites onto the mobile some of the biggest names from the US internet market all rolling out "m." mobile sites specifically formatted for mobile including m.twitter.com, m.facebook.com, m.myspace.com  In particular, the mobile version of facebook has been a massive success and has really helped to introduce mainstream users to the idea of mobile sites specifically formatted for the platform. 

In addition to mobile versions of sites which are big on the PC web, there is also going to be a role for sites which are focused mainly on mobile.   Despite now favouring PC focused websites, Opera Mini's own data shows that some of the most popular sites for users of its browser are mobile-specific such as mocospace, itsmy.com and pepperonity.com.  In many of the hyper-growth mobile data markets such as South Africa and India, mobile internet users have often not built up loyalty to PC versions of websites and specifically seek out sites which are optmised for mobile. 

In actual fact, far from demonstrating that there is no need for the "mobile web" the way that things are developing on the iphone actually proves the value of mobile-specific sites.  Despite the capabilities of the iphone browser, there has been a massive push to create iphone specific mobile websites such as iphone.facebook.com, iphone.ebay.com and iphone.foxnews.com. If there is no need for specific mobile sites anymore then why is everyone building iphone optimized sites?

If you are not convinced yet, here is an example of the main facebook site viewed through opera mini:

Completely horrible to navigate - "oh but you can zoom in" well here's what it looks like:

Not exactly scan-able is it?  Compare the user experience nightmare above to the mobile version of the site - which is what Opera SHOULD be linking to from their home page.

Much better isn't it?  All the functionality of facebook but in a mobile friendly format.  Anyway, point made I think, is there anyone out there that really believes we dont need mobile sites anymore?