Overall, the mobile ad market is projected to rise from $160 million to $3.1 billion by 2013. Source

The bottom line: The prediction that search will take a growing chunk of mobile ad spending is a good one, but there’s one issue with this report: it ignores the idea that some other forms of mobile ads will emerge over the next few years. We’re still very early in the evolution of mobile marketing, so it’s reasonable to think that more forms, apart from the three mentioned here, will emerge. Peggy adds: This point has come through in my own mobile advertising research project, where executives revealed that  (surprisingly)ad spend on sponsored search and related schemes were low on the agenda. t The reason: mobile search is still riddled with shortcomings. More on why mobile search is broken here.

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NORTH AMERICANS ARE TAKING OUT MULTIPLE MOBILE SUBS, says Wireless Intelligence. It says that in the US and Canada, the average consumer had 1.3 mobile connections in Q3, and that while average revenue per connection is dropping, ARPU is actually going up – it’s just spread across more than one connection. The group says that real ARPU in North America has gone from $60 in 2006 to $64. Source

The bottom line: Expect to see this trend continue as more and more consumers adopt mobile-enabled netbooks, data dongles and other connected devices.

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MORE PEOPLE ARE FINDING THEIR WAY VIA MOBILE, according to a new report from Berg Insight. The firm says that the number of mobile subscribers downloading navigation apps and routes to their mobile devices doubled to 28 million in the first half of 2009 from the year-earlier period. The firm also says that the subscriber base will see a CAGR of about 34 percent over the next six years, resulting in a 160 million users by 2015. Source

The bottom line: The ability to look up maps and routes on mobile devices is one that many consumers love, and the continued growth of GPS-enabled handsets will certainly fuel growth in usage of navigation services. But the PND market won’t remain static: more and more cars will feature built-in satnav, and the price of standalone units will continue to fall, which may explain the relatively low prediction of 160 million users by 2015.

—–

SYMBIAN TO SHIP 180 MILLION HANDSETS A YEAR BY 2014, says Juniper Research. Despite the emergence and growth of other smartphone platforms, the firm says that shipments of devices running the Symbian platform will more than double over the next five years. Coupled with Android and LiMo devices, Juniper estimates the market for open-source handsets will be more than 220 million per year by that time.

Juniper further contends that the market will migrate towards open-source platforms, despite the popularity of the proprietary iPhone and BlackBerry platforms.  Source

The bottom line: Any decent smartphone OS should show volume gains over the next five years as sales of smartphones skyrocket. That said, the mass market doesn’t care about open-source vs. proprietary – they want devices that meet their needs, and there are multiple ways to skin this proverbial cat. The choice of open-source vs. proprietary is less important than getting the basic OS right, and then having an open enough platform to support app and service development.

The bottom line: Mobile data revenues continue to grow, and are a bright spot for mobile operators among sinking voice spending. It’s also notable that given the U.S. recession, mobile data spending grew so strongly.

—–

NOKIA’S OVI STORE IS SEEING STRONG GROWTH, the company says, citing a 50 percent increase in downloads in August over July, with user registrations up 250 percent in the month. Nokia says it’s approving about 500 pieces of content per week for the store, including apps, games and content like ringtones. 27 operators in 8 countries currently support direct billing for the Ovi store, but Nokia says that the feature will be available in more than 20 countries by the end of Q1. Source

The bottom line: It’s nice to see the download figures rise, but without a breakdown of what kind of content users are grabbing – or how much they’re paying for it – it’s difficult to assess this market from an operator or content provider perspective. What are users downloading? And who’s making money in the Ovi Store?

—–

PRINT PUBLISHERS SEE MOBILE PLAYING AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT ROLE IN THEIR ONLINE PLANS, says a new survey from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the group that audits U.S. publishers’ subscriber figures. A third of those surveyed see mobile having a significant impact on their revenues within three years, and 70 percent say they’re paying more attention to mobile this year than last. 33 percent think they’ve got a good plan in place for the mobile market as well.

Also, 17 percent of those surveyed said they already had a smartphone app for their publication, and a further 56 percent plan to develop one in the next 24 months. Source

The bottom line: Print publishers are struggling, and it certainly looks like they are approaching mobile with much more determination than they initially did the web. They’re looking for new sources of revenue, and have big hopes for new platforms. But mobile in and of itself is not a business model for them, they’ve still got to figure out how to create value and generate revenues from it.

—–

NEWS AND REFERENCE APPS GET THE MOST WEEKLY USE AND STAY ON IPHONE USERS’ DEVICES THE LONGEST, says a report from mobile apps analytics provider Flurry. The company looked at the weekly usage rates and retention rates for several different types of apps, in an attempt to assess the level of user loyalty. It explains that the news and reference apps feature the most regularly updated content, hence their high usage and continued attraction.

It also found that “entertainment” apps, which it also calls gimmick apps (think iFart, the Zippo lighter app), have the lowest retention rate, highlighting how users download them, use them a few times, then delete them. It also broke out a couple of other sectors of usage patterns: one including apps like e-books, which get used intensely over a short period of time, and another holding navigation and productivity apps, which don’t get used as often, but are retained on devices for a long time. Source

The bottom line: These are some interesting figures that deliver some insight into how users – subconsciously, perhaps – view and utilize apps.

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THE NUMBER OF U.S. SMARTPHONE USERS ON SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES HAS TRIPLED in the past year, says new research from Nielsen. The company says there were 18.3 million unique users of mobile social networking sites on smartphones in July, up from 6.4 million in 2008. Facebook was the most popular site, getting twice as many users as the nearest rival, MySpace. Source

The bottom line: This follows last week’s data points that told a similar story and predicted even more growth for mobile social networking in the coming years. The mobile is an inherently social device, so expect to see ever-higher numbers.

The firm adds that the mobile Internet audience in the U.S. is now a third of the size of the wired Internet market, with the gap narrowing by the early part of the next decade. Source

The bottom line: No big surprises here, but some good insight into US mobile usage – in particular, the mobile internet audience is already a big target market for content providers and advertisers.
***
DON’T FORGET BLACKBERRY WEB USERS, says mobile web firm Bango. The company says BlackBerrys now account for 14 percent of all mobile web traffic, pulling ahead of the iPhone. Given the length of time BlackBerry has been in the market, plus the fact that essentially every such device comes with an unlimited data plan, it’s perhaps a little more surprising that the iPhone was ever ahead of the entire BlackBerry range. Source

The bottom line: Once again, we’re reminded that the mobile web is a lot more than just the iPhone, and that users of other devices generate significant traffic for publishers and content providers. It’s also another reminder that fragmentation among devices and the multitude of mobile web browsers on the market isn’t going away anytime soon!

***
TWO-THIRDS OF TWITTER USERS ARE UNDER 25, says eMarketer – or at least they were in May – while a tiny group of the service’s users account for most of its activity. Just 1.1 percent of Twitter users update more than 10 times per day, while 85 percent do so less than once per day; consequently, 5 percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of its activity.

There’s also a small class of the most popular users: just 0.68 percent have more than 1,000 folllowers, while nearly 94 percent have less than 100 followers. Going the other way, the same trends hold true. 92 percent of users follow less than 100 others, while 0.77 follow more than 1,000. Source

The bottom line: The usage figures throw a little bit of cold water on the idea that Twitter is a huge runaway hit among the wider web public, since apparently it’s really only heavily used by a small percentage of users. The 85 percent that don’t update daily also points to the service having a lot of dropouts or inactive users.

***
SMARTPHONE USERS WANT TO TALK TO THEIR DEVICES, says a new survey sponsored by speech-recognition vendor TellMe Networks. The survey says that three-fourths of people would choose a smartphone with speech-recognition and control features, while a similar majority wouldn’t be uncomfortable speaking commands into their phone in a restaurant.  Source

The bottom line: A survey sponsored by a speech-recognition vendor could hardly be expected to find anything other than interest in the technology, but as the features become more pervasive, awareness and usage would be expected to increase. There certainly are situations when speech commands make sense – in a car, for instance.

***

MORE THAN HALF OF SOCIAL NETWORK USERS HAVE BEFRIENDED A BRAND, says a recent report from eMarketer. Almost as many have said something positive about a brand on a social-networking site, while almost a quarter have said something negative.

The report casts some doubt on the widely held view that people don’t have a lot of interest in conversing with or “friending” companies, brands and products online. Source

The bottom line: While there’s a certain amount of apparent interest among social-networking users – or really, web users in general, in interacting with brands online, these figures shouldn’t be used by marketers as a justification to jump into social networking without a careful plan and strategy. This interest shouldn’t translate into free reign for companies to invade users’ personal online spaces, especially when there’s still a lot of room for them to damage their brands by doing so.

***

INDIA WILL BE A LEADING MOBILE CONTENT MARKET BY 2013, says analyst firm mobileSQUARED, generating $2.37 billion in mobile content revenues then, compared to $835.8 million this year. Additionally, the firm reports that the number of Indian subscribers will grow from 400 million now to 700 million by the end of 2010.

Leading the way in mobile content will be ringback tones, the firm says, with ringtones, graphics and wallpapers making big contributions. One major threat, though: Indian operators’ cut of content revenues, which the company says is normally more than 70% for on-portal content, or content billed through premium SMS. Source

The bottom line: The opportunity on the subcontinent is huge – but will the market move more quickly past the types of content listed above, and on to apps and ad-supported content?

The bottom line: These results highlight the potential of compelling, relevant and properly targeted messages. In particular, they illustrate how much more likely are consumers are to respond to SMS and MMS ads than simple Internet banners.  Peggy adds: Mobile Advertising Research U.K. confirms this, but there’s also a lot of mileage left in banners. For more on what makes for a great mobile advertising experience and a balanced value chain check back tomorrow for my take on a new-launch Hardees campaign.

***

TOP APPLICATIONS ON THE APPLE APP STORE HAVE MORE THAN 1 MILLION USERS, according to AdMob’s latest Mobile Metrics Report for May 2009. The report found that the most popular free applications in AdMob’s iPhone network generated the majority of usage, with the top 5 percent of applications garnering more than 100,000 users in May, and some apps showing more than 1 million active users.

A further 14 percent of applications had between 10,000 and 100,000 active users, while 54 percent of applications had less than 1,000. AdMob reached 15.1 million unique users through iPhone and iPod touch devices across 2,309 applications in May, with the average user accessing four applications.  44 percent of iPhone ad requests came from devices running the new version 3.0 of the iPhone OS, compared to just 1 percent of iPod touch requests.  Source

The bottom line: These numbers from AdMob underline the ongoing popularity of apps on the iPhone. But they also offer some insight into the potential value of in-app advertising for developers and content providers, since the apps in AdMob’s iPhone network are all free to download, and earn money solely from advertising.

***

SUBSCRIPTION VIDEO AND MUSIC ACCOUNT FOR 40 PERCENT OF MOBILE DOWNLOADS IN THE UK, according to a study from GfK, as the model grows in popularity against pay-per-download sales. The research also states that casual and classic trivia and word games lead the mobile gaming market with 27 per cent of sales, while the budget sector (£3 or less) is also enjoying success through basic and retro games.  It also adds that nine per cent of the mobile tariffs signed up in the UK in Q1 have bundled-in flat-rate data.
Source

The bottom line: This study illustrates the growing popularity of the flat-rate model, both in mobile data access, but also in content subscriptions. Still, the content-subscription model contrasts with the booming pay-per-download app store model.  Will one triumph over the other?

***

AD-FUNDED MMS REVENUES TO HIT $8.7 BILLION by 2014, says Juniper Research in a new Mobile Messaging report.  The report says that annual growth rates are reaching 94%, with SMS and mobile email continuing to dominate the person-to-person (p2p) mobile messaging market.

The report, entitled “Mobile Messaging & IP Evolution”, found that the Far East & China would lead the global ad-funded MMS market by a considerable margin, followed by North America and Western Europe.  The adoption of push MMS and SMS in mature and emerging markets has enabled network operators to support ad-funded voice and SMS tariffs, and combat falling ARPU, while providing brands with new advertising channels. Source

The bottom line: These are bold projections from Juniper.  P2P MMS messaging still has a way to go before it reaches the usage level of SMS, but these projections suggest that MMS advertising could prove to be a lucrative revenue stream in its own right.

***

MORE THAN 60 PERCENT OF MOBILE USERS STILL ONLY USE THEIR HANDSET FOR VOICE AND TEXT, according to a KPMG survey. The survey of 4,190 consumers in 19 countries also says that consumer satisfaction rates with mobile services have increased. Music satisfaction is up to 66 percent, video 52 percent (from just 14 percent), IM 44 percent and live TV 38 percent.

The factors influencing users’ next mobile content purchase, according to the survey are, in order: clarity of pricing, cost, ability to save content, download speed and the ability to try content before purchasing it.  36 percent of respondents said they would accept mobile advertising, while 49 percent said they would accept it in music and 28 percent in games.  Source

The bottom line: The level of acceptance of mobile advertising is encouraging.  However, the headline is arguably the most pertinent point: for over 60 percent of consumers, the mobile internet doesn’t exist and text messaging is the only data application of a mobile device.

***

MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT REVENUES ARE EXPECTED TO GROW 28 PERCENT ON AVERAGE over the next year, according to the Mobile Entertainment Forum’s quarterly Business Confidence Index, up one percent from its last survey.

Content owners are much more optimistic about their revenues, with the anticipated average income up from $6.1 million to $17.1 million.Revenue in Western Europe is expected to be down 10 percent, North American revenues are predicted to be up 8

percent. 81 percent of respondents said they were as confident as last year about the future of their business. Source

The bottom line: This MEF study illustrates a bullish mobile entertainment market, unbowed by the economic climate.  It could be that, aside from the natural obligation towards market confidence, stakeholders believe the purchasing of relatively low cost content through microbilling will remain popular as consumers delay the big ticket items and seek alternative forms of entertainment.

***

APATHY AND PRICE RULE IN NOT SELECTING THE iPHONE, say the latest findings from The NPD Group.  The study showed that the primary reasons consumers do not want to purchase an iPhone are “lack of interest” (55 percent) and “high price” (42 percent).

One in five mobile phone owners say they want to purchase an iPhone, but have not yet done so, and NPD’s report indicates data plan pricing and exclusivity remain key obstacles.  18 percent of consumers who have not purchased an iPhone cited the expense of the data plan, while 21 percent said they didn’t want to switch carriers.  Source

The bottom line: Reasons why Apple’s iPhone isn’t persuading everyone to leave their current carrier and device seem quite simple: they aren’t actually that bothered.  Given the previous data point, which revealed that 60 percent of people only use voice and text, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

***

iPHONE USERS TOP SMARTPHONE LOYALTY ratings, according to a new survey by Crowd Science.  It also says four out of ten BlackBerry and other smartphone users would switch to Apple’s iPhone as their next smartphone purchase.

On the other hand, only 14 percent of non-BlackBerry smartphone users would switch to a BlackBerry for their next purchase. Meanwhile, a huge 82 percent of iPhone users are loyal to the brand. Source

The bottom line: In contrast to the previous report, this one highlights the attitudes of smartphone users who, almost by definition of being smartphone users, care a little more.  The study is as much a study of consumer brand perception, and the iPhone steals the show as expected, but BlackBerry may take note of the small minority who would switch for their next purchase.

***

MORE THAN HALF HAVE MOBILE SECURITY FEARS, according to mobile security specialists, Cloudmark Inc.  The report says mobile spam now affects two in three consumers, more than 50 percent worry about mobile security, and only 7 percent believe the information they send over the phone is secure.

Cloudmark also says the concern about mobile security is detrimentally affecting the adoption of mobile services such as banking and e-commerce, with more than two thirds (69.3%) of consumers stating that they wouldn’t use value-added services such as mobile banking.

Two thirds of consumers (65.9%) have received unwanted or unsolicited messages (spam) on their mobile phone. While a majority of spam messages could simply be seen as a nuisance, 29% of respondents had received malicious spam such as phishing messages, fraud messages or messages containing inappropriate content.  Source

The bottom line: This report highlights the ongoing fears around the security of mobile devices, which will likely become more prevalent as smartphones become more pervasive, and spammers and malware authors pay more attention to mobile. However, we should also remember that the mobile security specialists who produced the report might have a small agenda of their own.

The bottom line: As illustrated numerous times within this section, the data dominance and superior browsing experience allowed by smartphones is undeniable.  Making mobile Web user experience smooth, easy, and compelling – as these handsets often do – is shown to consistently drive mobile data traffic.  That many consumers probably can’t tell and don’t care about the difference between mobile websites and HTML sites is also testament to technical developments.

***

GARTNER SAYS THE NUMBER OF MOBILE PAYMENT users will increase by 70 percent this year.  Its report claims that 73.4 million users of mpayment in 2009 would represent a leap of 70.4 percent from 2008.  By 2012, it says mobile payment will reach more than 190 million, more than 3 percent of total mobile users worldwide, attaining a level at which it will be considered “mainstream.”

Gartner defines a mobile payment as paying for a product or service using mobile technology such as a short message service (SMS), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD), and Near Field Communication (NFC). It includes transactions that use cash, bank accounts or debit and credit cards, as well as non-carrier stored value accounts, such as travel cards, gift cards or PayPal. It does not include transactions that use mobile operators’ billing systems, such as purchase of mobile content or telebanking by mobile to the service center via an interactive voice response (IVR) system. Source

The bottom line: Although the definition of mobile payment is ambiguous here, these figures demonstrate that the mass market is slowly growing confident in using their mobile to pay for and transfer money.  Much effort has been made to foster consumer confidence in the micropayment mobile payment space, and the adoption of mobile banking technologies still varies drastically from region to region.  There are regulatory and security challenges to overcome, particularly with the emergence of NFC technologies, but these figures give strong reason for hope.

***

SPEECH APPLICATIONS ARE TO TRIPLE by 2014 according to a new Datamonitor report. The report claims that as we get used to using mobile computing devices in ‘hands-busy’, ‘eyes-busy’ environments, speech recognition technologies are expected to gain considerable traction. The global market for advanced speech recognition (ASR) in mobile handsets will increase from $32.7 million in 2009 to $99.6 million in 2014. Meanwhile ASR in-vehicle telematics is expected to grow from $64.3 million in 2009 to 208.2 million by 2014. Source

The bottom line: An exciting array of new voice applications has been promised for some time now, without seeming to gain mass market adoption.  This Datamonitor report suggests the market is still full of potential, and with technologies emerging to intuitively allow users to control device functionality with their voice, these projections may herald the beginning of significant penetration.

Peggy adds: A space to watch is voice-activated mobile search, where “Just say what you want,” the guiding principle of voice search to avoid complex and confusing navigation, and to provide a shortcut to information (in the network) and services (on the mobile device) the user wants, is particularly compelling.

***

OPERA’S MINI BROWSER RECORDED MORE THAN 23.4 million users worldwide in April, a jump of 140 percent from the same period one year ago. Page views in America grew 129 percent over the last year; unique users grew 11.8 percent; and there was an average of 198 page views per user in April. U.S. carrier subscribers are said to be viewing more data-intensive pages than those in any other country. Opera said the average page viewed is about 32KB compressed (almost 320KB uncompressed).

Top 10 sites accessed via Opera Mini in the U.S., by number of unique users:

1. Google.com
2. Facebook.com
3. MySpace.com
4. Wikipedia.org
5. YouTube.com (up from 7)
6. Yahoo.com
7. NYTimes.com (down from 5)
8. AccuWeather.com
9. My.Opera.com
10. ESPN.com

Source

The bottom line: The mobile Internet is continuing to see heavy usage and mass adoption, although we should remember these figures are largely coming from BlackBerry handsets operating Opera. The handsets do have massive appeal, as clearly does mobile Internet content.  However, we might also remember that, as a corporate device of choice, their users may not always be paying the bills

***

AN AENEAS STRATEGY STUDY OF U.K. ATTITUDE TOWARDS mobile advertising found that 64 percent of consumers would grant permission to receive mobile advertising if they were incentivized.  The majority of the 1,002 consumers surveyed had a more negative initial attitude, but this changed if advertising was made relevant (65 percent positive), permission was asked (67 percent positive), or if the consumer was in control (69 percent positive). It placed mobile amongst the most popular traditional media (print, outdoor, and television) and above the Internet and radio. 

The research also revealed that 52 percent claim engagement with the brands they love is important, five advertisements per day is most accepted by consumers, 52 percent of consumers doesn’t mind listening to a brand message while waiting for someone to pick up the phone, and 54 percent would send an interesting offer they have received to  friends and family

Tarik Fawzi, of Aeneas Strategy Consulting and Management, commented: ”The consumer research shows some unexpected results regarding consumer attitude towards mobile advertising. Also mobile is compared with other media. This shows consumers know what they want and are open towards mobile advertising, if it is offered on their terms.” Source

The bottom line: This study shows once again that relevancy and control of mobile advertising are critical to its consumer acceptance and success.  The challenge mobile advertising faces is in making campaigns relevant, and offering control, but still maintaining a strong enough number of eyeballs to keep brands spending.

Peggy adds: This consumer research will also be discussed during Mobile Advertising U.K. (June 15 in London), when MSG, which was commissioned to research and write the report in collaboration with Aeneas, will present key findings from interviews with 15+ industry executives and influencers.

***

41 PERCENT OF U.S. CONSUMERS ARE LIKELY TO PURCHASE a multimedia handset with a data plan as their next phone, says a new study by the Yankee Group. BlackBerry and Apple are the top two brands, considered by 44 percent and 30 percent of prospective buyers, respectively.

Meanwhile, in enterprise, the same analyst claims that 75 percent of small to medium businesses anticipate some reduction in their business technology investments due to the economy. End-user software and hardware are the two areas that will experience the biggest budget cuts. Source

The bottom line: These two nuggets from Yankee illustrate the ongoing consumer affair with smartphones, and the rich data consumption experience they allow, in the face of predictable technology cutbacks which the environment has imposed on smaller businesses. It’s tough out there, but consumers remain enthused about compelling mobile data experiences, if the data plan is right.

When Peggy recounted the main points of her recent – and extremely pragmatic –mobile advertising white paper and hinted that the next step might be to mobilize MSG, we decided the timing was right to provide publishers with a how-to guide to mobilizing their content using MSG as a real-life example.

And what better time that the week of Mobile World Congress (MWC), an event that showcases the best in the mobile space and celebrates an astounding 4 billion connections. According to Wireless Intelligence, the GSMA’s market intelligence unit, this milestone underscores the continued strong growth of the mobile industry and puts the global market on the path to reach a staggering 6 billion connections by 2013.

In addition to this impressive subscriber growth, we’re also seeing a similar upswing in mobile Internet usage. In July 2008 a comScore report counted nearly 13 million mobile internet users in the U.K. alone - translating to approximately 25 percent of the U.K. population. Though this number is less than the 70 percent of the U.K. population using the PC internet, it represents a seismic shift in the absolute number of mobile Internet users compared with 2007.

This increase in interest, coupled with the impact of the iPhone and the introduction of cheaper data tariffs and new off-portal mobile services, positions the mobile Internet for phenomemal growth.

What is the impact on publishers?

While they could continue to focus on the PC Internet rather than tackle the task of creating a mobile site (reasoning that the emerging nature of the mobile market, a set of different technologies and standards, unknown potential set-up costs and lack of certifiable return on investment make this a smart business move), we strongly advise against this inertia.

Waiting is a mistake for two reasons. First, mobile users are already exploring the so-called PC Internet, turning up the pressure on publishers to deliver a good experience. Second, they would be foolish not to take advantage of the opportunity to increase incremental revenue by targeting new users with a mobile-optimized site.

Of course, websites designed for viewing on PCs don’t always render particularly well on tiny mobile phone screens. For this reason, many publishers are pursuing a strategy that requires them to develop a second site, specifically optimized for mobile screens, thus providing the mobile traffic that arrives on their PC websites with a mobile-optimized destination.

It’s too early to tell whether users with smartphones or touchscreen devices (iPhone, G1 and BlackBerry, for example), who can view full PC websites, actually prefer the full PC experience to accessing a mobile-optimized website. But even if they are, these users still do not represent the mass market. As AdMob shows in its monthly metrics report, the vast majority of mobile phone users own low-end and mid-range devices, a large sector that can indeed benefit from being able to view mobile-optimized versions of the websites they know and love from the PC.

To be clear, not all websites require a mobile version to reach their audience. Sites such as Twitter, some text based blogs, and some listings websites for example make the jump from PC to mobile quite easily. However, at the end of the day, there is no easy way to tell whether a specific PC site will make for great viewing (as is) on a mobile phone. This depends on a variety of factors including the choice of mobile browser, the nature of the website content, the actual handset capabilities and latency (amount of data transferred and bandwidth available), each playing a role in determining how well a PC website converts to mobile viewing.

This is where Mippin and other similar services come in. Mippin Mobilizer enables publishers and content owners to build a mobile site for free and customize it in line with the PC equivalent website design. Mippin Mobilizer also provides the ability to promote the site for free, by either creating a custom mobile URL so that traffic can be redirected to the mobile version of the site, or by taking readers through to a PC-based mobile site emulator (more on this in the Mobilizer “how to” section further down in this column).

Finally, Mippin enables publishers to monetize their mobile-optimized destinations through mobile advertising, returning 100 percent of the revenue generated around publishers content in many instances.

Granted Mippin is not the only company offering this sort of service – FeedMate, Wapple, mobiSiteGalore, Mofuse and Wordpress plugins also go a long way toward helping publishers optimize their content for mobile. However, Mippin goes one decisive step further, incorporating sites mobilized with Mippin into the Mippin mobile portal, a top destination that generates significant traffic. This way the burden isn’t entirely on the publisher to boost visibility or discoverability through investing in SEO or paid search schemes; they benefit from being part of a portal – and an ecosystem — that generates traffic for all its members.

Other providers – such as Mofuse – also allow publishers a place on their mobile portal. With Mippin, however, the added emphasis is on discovery (through the use of tools and technologies) to further match publisher content to the right user.

To this end Mippin has purposely drawn from a  range of web 2.0 principles and added new features including portal auto-personalization, content recommendation and social likeness features (in the form of a “similarity meter” identifying common interests, or lack of) to connect users to relevant publisher content based on preferences and passions. It’s a virtuous cycle: Publishers can connect with new readers and users get the content they want most.

Whether a publisher chooses to use Mippin Mobilizer depends on their business case and objectives. But it’s important to know what is involved if you want to mobilize your content.

At Peggy’s invitation we have mobilized MSearchGroove and documented the steps in this process in a simple how-to guide.

There are four quick steps to launching PC content as a live mobile site: Mobilize, Customize, Publicize and Monetize.

The first step was to re-render content from the msearchgroove.com website. This needs to be in the form of a feed, in an RSS or Atom based format.

The msearchgroove.com feed here is mobilized in a few seconds, where it appears in the emulator on the same page. This takes us through to the second step, customizing the new mobile version with branding that reflects the website. As you can see, the process is pretty straightforward.

It’s easy to spend time trying out design combinations with the adjacent emulator; you might want an individual look for your mobile site, or a design that resembles your website. Either way the colour palette provides a good selection of colours, and can additionally handle any hex or colour value that is currently available. The msearchgroove.com site was completed in a few minutes, with the logo uploaded and colours reflecting the website easy to find and replicate.

Once the msearchgroove.com site was branded, the next step was to get the word out to existing and potential readers. To assist publishers Mippin Mobilizer offers a vriety of tools and feaures such as reader auto-redirection (directing readers to the new mobile-optimzed destination). Mippin Mobilzer also helps publishers promote the new site from their PC website by providing a “Make It Mobile” button (which publishers can add to their site or blog) and the option to create their own mobile URL.

In this case, we chose www.mippin.com/msearchgroove. (If you wish to go one further and automatically redirect PC traffic to a mobile site you must change the DNS settings for the website. Mippin provides step-by-step Information explaining this procedure here.

As I noted, publishes have the option of embedding the “Make It Mobile” button by selecting the relevant blogger platform (Mippin Mobilizer is currently integrated with Blogger & Typepad), or using the html code generated. Embedding this also links the msearchgroove.com website to a PC emulator demonstration of the mobile site. We recommend this highly as it also provides publishers access to QR codes (or 2D-barcodes), which can help users navigate quickly and simply to the new site by just capturing the QR code with their cameraphone.

Another way to get the word out and generate interest in the mobile-optimized website is through tags. With Mippin Mobilizer it’s possible to assign a selection of predefined tags to the mobile site, thus improving the number of times the site is returned within Mippin mobile portal site search results.

It’s possible to create an infinite amount of tags, but it’s important to note that Mippin’s portal search algorithms also rank search results on that basis of other factors such as relevancy (determined by tracking the sites a user has visited previous) and user recommendations (similar sites and content recommended by like-minded peers).

Almost there! The last step is all about monetizing the traffic you get, whether that traffic is direct to consumer (users found you on their own) or acquired through a presence on the Mippin mobile portal. To enable monetization, Mippin authorizes the site feed and provides the publisher with a  validation key. In this example, the process requires the publishers to submit a recent blog post to verify that the real owner of the site authorizes the destination to deliver mobile ads.

Once authorized, advertising from AdMob will be inserted in to the site at the top or bottom of the pages, though not within stories. (Note: Mippin doesn’t take a revenue share if the publisher uses their own AdMob ID. Click here for more details.)

And that’s it – the msearchgroove.com mobile site is live! It’s now optimized for any mobile traffic arriving on the site and can be viewed at www.mippin.com/msearchgroove!

Peggy adds: Hope you enjoy the MSG mobile-optimized site. MSG will also be a test case for a cool new product Mippin is slated to launch a little later on this year, so please check back. MSG will also  road test a variety of solutions for a new how-to white paper on mobile publishing, so watch this space.