Mobile industry: beware of Google?
The last of the three horsemen: Google and mobile. Recent acquisitions include Dodgeball, mobile social networking, and Neven Vision (mobile) image capture and search. Investors beware, the global mobile advertising market will jump to $11.3 billion in 2011. I wonder if that includes mobile classifieds? Read the well-structure analysis or the complete chaotic source.
Yahoo’s laser-focus on mobile
Besides eBay, also Yahoo had its Q3 earnings call. The strategic outlook for 2007 of both eBay and Yahoo are always visible in their Q3 analyst updates. Yahoo’s CEO Terry Semel was very clear about the strategic direction of Yahoo:
"Moving forward, we are going to be laser-focused on these three core things:"
- Close the gap in monetization of search
- Widen our lead in graphical advertising, and
- Seize the opportunity in social media, video and mobile.
Note of the MoCoNews editor: ‘all of which can be combined with mobile of course"
Terry Semel said "We plan to further invest, innovate and secure leading positions in the areas where we see the biggest growth opportunities: in social media, video, and mobile… We are going to continue to build our technology, develop new products, and extend our reach with mobile service providers."
Daniel Rosenswaig, COO of Yahoo clarified that the focus of Yahoo will be on the mobile first customer. The mobile first customer is somebody who’s entire Internet experience may be to start on mobile or move to mobile. How? (1) Acquiring audience first and (2)
Monetize the opportunity.
Terry , quickly corrected his COO by changing the order of importance and added that the current partnerships to deliver this strategy are the mobile manufacturers and mobile operators. Good of Mobiya to be in the middle, with a clear laser-focused execution on delivering mobile enablement services of user generated content such as classifieds and news.
Read the article "Yahoo! Q3 Earnings Call – Mobile Important" or read the complete transcript of the Q3 earnings all at SeekingAlpha.
Continued… eBay and Classifieds
Contextual advertising is considered to be the next thing to subsidize loss-making free online classified sites. eBay cooked a major revenue share deal with Google to monetize its free online classified sites overseas (outside the US). eBay’s overseas classified portfolio include sites such as Marktplaats.nl, Kijiji, Gumptree, mobile.de, LuQUo. This will fuel these sites with necessary revenues to compete harder with newspaper publishers in the battle for the classified.
eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman stated in a conference call with investors that the company’s online classifieds portfolio is continuing its upward trajectory. Whitman says "This is a business we weren’t even in two years ago, and now we’re in more than
400 cities. While this is still a largely nascent business, we see great
opportunities to further expand and monetize classifieds. As an example, we have
recently introduced advertising in some markets, and the early results are
promising."
eBay CFO Bob Swan said later during the call, "Our classifieds business is
rapidly gaining traction in all of our served markets. Globally, we now get over
22 million unique visitors per month, growing at close to triple-digit rates,
and we’re beginning to monetize some of our classified sites via contextual
advertising."
Read the article "eBay uses Google to monetize classifieds sites" or read the complete transcript of the Q3 earnigs call at SeekingAlpha.
Segmented marketing: the future of classifieds
12manage defines segmented or niche marketing as the process of finding small but potentially profitable market segments and designing custom-made products or services for them. Typically, the small market segment has been overlooked by larger competitors, but is still large enough to be attractive.
eBay has become big and very profitable and started to drive diversification, mainly on a markets basis: introduction of eBay classifieds, launch of eBay express shopping service, etc. eBay’s focus on broadening their markets, have left certain untapped niches open to segmented marketing competition:
- (UK) Oodle debuts local classifieds search for students: article and website
- (UK) Carphone to auction used mobiles online: article and website
Opinion article Inside
The magazine Inside has celebrated its 10th anniversary. Inside has covered the online media industry since ’96. It has been a reference for many online media and interactive marketing people.
Mobiya was able to contribute to this jubilee edition with an opinion article about the evolution of classified advertising and the revolution of mobile enabling them.
Read the complete article here (pdf)
.
Shortcode in ads work
M:Metric has released a study which found that a relatively high number of mobile users have responded to shortcodes in ads: "With Spain topping the list at 29.1 percent, followed by the UK at 18.5 percent, France at 10.1 percent, the United States at 7 percent and Germany at 3.4 percent." Unsurprisingly the most common response is to shortcodes on television, but that’s mostly for voting on reality shows and so on. Mobiya’s short code in Belgium, 4050, will create a call to action to post a classified advertisement into our partners online classified network. The communication mix will consist of a selection of print, online and radio advertising.
The new mobile frontier for social networking
Excellent article how existing social networking sites will perform in a mobile space: Will mobile be the new frontier for MySpace and Bebo. Some key elements:
- Mobile will be an important part of the big Web 2.0 deployment
- Mobile phones are the obvious medium to interact with online content
- Social networking sites are generally a very popular destination for users
- But for these popular brands it is more than just registering a .mobi domain
- It is re-thinking the online part in relation to the mobile, not just transferring it
It is unclear whether mobile will be the primary or secondary platform for social networking, but it is clear it will have an important part to play. Will the services that can deliver a relevant and rich mobile experience ultimately prevail? Certainly, but it’ll take time. Brands as MySpace were not build in one day and they will look for solution providers that got the mobile integration right.
Mobiya is able to capitalise the impending crossover between Web 2.0 and mobile, starting today with classified advertising. We are on the right track, introducing location based services, rich media such as video-over-mms and an integrated micro payment right into the core of our platform.
Mobiya and the Olympic Spirit
Throughout the year, Mobiya has participated in two Belgian business award competitions. The first one is Bizidee, that analyses your project from idea and feasibility study into early stage business planning. Bizidee is followed by Enterprize. Enterprize rewards innovative projects and young entrepreneurs with established businesses.
The good news is that Mobiya has been nominated in both business award competitions as a finalist: top 10 finalist in Bizidee: see announcement, top 6 finalist in Enterprize (see announcement). The bad news is that we were not able to reach the top 3, with other words, win a medal. That’s where my analogy starts with the Olympic Games.
Athletes are selected from various countries by their respective national sport federation once the athletes were able to demonstrate talent, success and a winner mentality.
Being a young athlete or running a new startup has many similarities. Initially, you need to surround yourself with professional people, such as coaches and trainers. Then you need to prove that your talent in sports or your new business idea is sustainable.
Once selected, you need to participate in the final and try to win that medal. Mobiya did not win a medal. So, let’s finish with the Olympic Spirit saying that participating is more important than winning. But we feel like winners, being selected as a finalist out of +400 businesses. We are onto something!