Mobiya partners with Oodle to launch mobile classified service for Magic 105.4
LONDON, August 25, 2008: Mobiya announced today the launch of a new mobile classified service for Magic 105.4 and Magic Digital in collaboration with Oodle UK. Magic is a very popular national radio station and TV brand in the United Kingdom, owned by media giant Bauer.
How does it work? Very easy, listen to Magic’s 30sec radio commercial: Download magiclocal.wav
Magic radio reaches 2.7 million listeners every week and triggers users to text message their classified with picture to Mobiya’s MMS short code 66121. Mobiya handles the mobile user experience for people placing picture classifieds via MMS and simple text messaging.
Mobiya and Oodle exchange the classified content over their networks and within minutes the classified content is indexed and made available to Oodle’s audience. Oodle publishes the classified listings to the web via their online classified portal and white label Oodle Marketplaces such as Magic Local. These listings reach over 1 million potential buyers a month.
An example of the most recent mobile classified listing: http://www.oodle.co.uk/browse/?q=mobiya
How to respond? When clicking on an individual mobile classified in the Oodle listing you are taken back to Mobiya to find more information about the item for sale and to see the instructions about how to contact the seller. A simple web form allows users to safely enter their mobile phone number. Mobiya’s system will then bring the buyer and seller in contact over mobile communication.
Three examples of recently published picture classifieds:
- http://magic.mobiya.co.uk/showad/adgpam (car for sale)
- http://magic.mobiya.co.uk/showad/adgpat (collector’s items)
- http://magic.mobiya.co.uk/showad/adgpdj (DVD movies)
Mobiya and Oodle have revolutionized the way people interact with classifieds – by introducing mobile services and combining it with meta-distribution. In less than 60 seconds from taking a picture with a camera-phone and sending it to 66121 your advert is indexed by Oodle and made available for search to millions of users. Try it yourself: click here.
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Mobiya and Oodle powered mobile classified for Magic radio features:
- Ad placement over MMS with image and video, location tagging and keyword indexing
- Ad indexing and search via Oodle classified advertising network and marketplaces
- Ad publishing via full-branded custom web forms and classified widgets from Mobiya
- Ad responding over SMS to unlock contact details and any kind of hidden information
About Mobiya
Mobiya, a mobile classified advertising network, is available to 70 million people in the UK and Belgium. Mobiya operates classified services for media giants such as Bauer Media, Reed Business Information and Concentra Media Group, newspaper publishers such as Sport Newspapers and Metro Belgium, and classified specialists such as Koopjeskrant. Mobiya is consistently ranked among the top innovative players in the mobile advertising industry with its emerging mobile classified platform: Mobiya System 1: one classified media platform for all mobiles, all formats and all media. Mobiya is privately owned and has offices in Oxfordshire, UK and Gent, Belgium.
Further information can be viewed at www.mobiya.com and www.mobiyalog.com.
About Oodle
Oodle (www.oodle.co.uk), is a whole new way to shop classifieds. Bringing together more than 3.0 million listings from 100′s of classified sites, Oodle improves the way people buy and sell locally. Oodle offers the most comprehensive search, convenient email alerts and information to empower consumers to make better buying decisions.
Since its launch in 2006, the Oodle UK network has grown rapidly and delivers over 2,400,000 monthly referrals to its content partners. The Oodle UK Network powers classifieds for leading brands, including The Sun Newspaper, Lycos UK, Magic Radio and Infospace. The Oodle Network offers media companies and portals a proven business model for free listings and the best classifieds marketplace for their customers.
About Magic 105.4
Visit Magic’s web site or or listen live to Magic 105.4: Magic 105.4 Webstream.
Mobiya and Metro launch picture classifieds over MMS, in print and online
Brussels, August 20, PRNewswire: Building further on a groundbreaking mobile classified partnership, Metro and Mobiya today announced plans for the world's first MMS-driven picture classified service that has the added benefit for Metro readers to immediately transfer images via their camera-phones over Mobiya's short codes into the online and print classified listings of SMS Deal, a Metro classified brand operated by Mobiya.
Available in September 2008, Metro and Mobiya are currently testing the service in Belgium's biggest national free newspaper. This involves management of the SMS/MMS user experience over Mobiya's classified content capturing short codes; content structuring for indexing high-quality ads with location information and user generated tags; rich-media content preparation for print publication and API feed management into Metro's web portals and various other online classified portals.
Consumers craving more mobile services will appreciate the MMS classified service: snapping an image with your camera-phone and instantly sending it across as a mobile classified is quick, easy and free, as most post-paid price plans bundle free MMS. No need to boot a computer, synchronizing image libraries from your mobile phone to your hard disk, and uploading everything via a web browser. In less than one-minute from snapping the image, your picture classified is online, and next day in print.
The MMS picture classified service is currently available to 10 million users in Belgium. People wanting a demonstration can directly contact Mobiya at 09 265 02 92 (Belgium) or 020 8133 0100 (UK). MMS stands for Multimedia Messaging Service.
A picture speaks a thousand words. Snapshot from today's publication.
Rethinking Twitter’s business model – analogies with Mobiya
A lot of blog posts have been written about Twitter no longer delivering outbound SMS over its UK number. Instead of talking more about the same, I'll provide insights and make suggestions how to make their business model work instead of simply writing opinions such as "without Twitter actually having figured out a business model yet, it was always destined to be this way…" (paidContent:UK).
On top of that, the co-founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, got his PR completely wrong talking about a costly situation created by his users: "Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US." How can you ever publicly talk about your customer 'costing' you money. It is your lifeblood of your company! Time for Biz Stone to learn a thing or two about media, mobile advertising, monetization…
According to TechCrunch, Twitter gets about $0.020 to $0.031 per incoming text message (also called Mobile Originated message or MO), and according to Mike Butcher and the FT Twitter is paying between £0.010 and £0.030 per outbound message (Mobile Terminated, or MT message). Roughly converting this to USD: $0.020 and $0.056. Important to know: Twitter only transmits 140 characters and leaves 20 characters open for… mobile advertising of course!
The beauty of Twitter is that for every MO, or in other words, for every user sending in a piece of content to Twitter, the system triggers a multitude of MTs, or people receiving the content over SMS in an alerted way. This is an almost perfect example of a Social Media network. No editors, moderators, or humans sitting in between users sending in content, and the community receiving content. No paper, computers, television screens, but a fully automated almost complete mobile service driven by servers, software and mobile networks. Talking about technology!
Now, let's start to build up their business model. Let's assume a user sends a piece of content over SMS into Twitter: "I have a hangover today, don't mix beer and wine" and this user is followed by 10 people. Twitter will receive about 3 cent from the MO and pays let's assume on average about 3 cent [$0.020 to $0.056] for every outbound MT, or 27 cent in total for sending ten messages [30 – 3 = 27]. In marketing terms: the cost to reach 10 people is 27 cents. Realize, this is a fully opted-in service(Twitter is a subscription service) triggered by a user-activity, not by editors and media moguls publishing paper!
If we scale this up to a $1,000 cost generated by a single user, then I conclude for the sake of Twitter's business model, that a single user can create a mobile media inventory of 37,000 SMS impressions per year (or 37,037 to be exact), by simply dividing $1,000 by $0.027! Mobile inventory has the meaning of monetizable interactivity for advertising purposes.
In terms of CPM prices in the mobile media world, Twitter has to create advertising deals from $27 upwards, just to be cost-neutral. So, instead of blaming the consumer to be the problem, he is simply part of the solution, as this user just created a 37,000 impression mobile advertising inventory. In terms of CPM prices, I would enter the market with a $50 to $100 CPM price point, depending on the number of characters used: 20 characters for a $50 CPM (approx. 20% margin); and for a dedicated 160 character follow-on mobile advertising messages I would set the price at $100 (approx. 70% margin!!!). Reference: LinkedIn sells online advertising at a $75 CPM.
Even at a price-point of $50 with a +20% margin, you can outsource the sales. Media buyers are looking for a 15% commission. To summarise Twitter: perfect scalability in terms of technology and business, fully automated platform, great user experience, outsourced sales, and still making 5% on every outgoing message, doing nothing, just keeping it in a good shape and dealing with huge volumes… we are talking hundreds of thousands outgoing messages per day!
The difficulty: it requires advertising sales skills to convince advertisers about the advantages of mobile media: the device is always switched on, location can be pulled from the network, and tweets received from people you follow are always read, as you show an interest in that person! A dream for every marketer to get involved in that kind of communication!
Big question now: how sustainable is it? Well, I see three problems with Twitter:
Problem #1: Randomness: the way the platform works is that anyone can request to become a follower of a person. The community is connected in such a 'woven' way that it is very difficult to extract any targeted information from (a) the context (b) the community and (c) the content. Having no user patterns, content categories, or demographics available will make it difficult in time to sustain the mobile advertising CPM price.
Problem #2: Boredom: the type of communication over the Twitter platform is very fluid. Although having some kind of real-time alerting information about what your friends are doing, how they are feeling, what they are reading, seeing, experiencing might be great for the first couple of weeks, but after a while you become more selective about the alerts and tweets you want to receive.
Problem #3: Interactivity: a personally for me the most annoying missing thing about Twitter is that I cannot respond or interact over Twitter from a received tweet. There is no direct interaction possible on posted content, maybe something for Twitter to think about. This could just increase the traffic volumes by probably another 300% or so.
At Mobiya, we've done things differently: our content choice of 'Classifieds' allows us to understand the context (buying or selling), popularity & ranking (measurement), and to define vertical content categories (automotive, housing, etc.). We have also a 100% bi-directional interactivity (not like Twitter or Blyk, simply 'broadcasting' SMS messages), as buyers and sellers are interacting over a single short code, and over a unique piece of classified content. Very exciting times, and I wish Twitter all the best in sourcing the right SMS partner for their business. Mobile advertising is the way forward.
UK: 1.4 billion text messages, every week. Up 30%
The Evening Standard (July 29, 2008) and The Mobile Data Association report that Britons are sending 1.4 billion text messages every week, according to the latest figures. MDA said the figure was 30 per cent higher than a year ago. Picture and video messaging is also 30 per cent higher than a year ago, with 10 million picture messages sent every week. Mobile internet has grown by 25 per cent since May 2006, with an average 4,500 new users every day. Figures show 16.5 million people used the internet from their mobile this May.
Complete article: http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=2632