PODCAST: InfoSpace Reveals Virgin Mobile U.K. Makes Its Mark With Mobile (Meta) Search
Readers who may have followed my continuing and comprehensive analysis of the mobile search space at MoCoNews (all mobile search coverage can be found at the MoCo site channel here) will recall that metasearch has been on my radar for many months. After all, if the mobile Web experience is destined to repeat the fixed Internet then there is a strong case for user choice among search engines and destinations, bound to result in the rise of mobile metasearch.But now it’s more than a hunch. Virgin Mobile in the U.K. has embraced the technology big-time, extending its agreement with white-label metasearch provider InfoSpace to offer its subscribers the ability to search the web, WAP sites and Virgin Mobile’s own portal and storefront providing access to ringtones, games and other premium content.
InfoSpace’s long-standing relationships with the likes of Yahoo and MSN (no, Google isn’t on board for this one yet) allows Virgin to offer a breadth of results from branded search engine giants and so lay the groundwork for a potentially lucrative mobile advertising play.The takeaway: Mobile metasearch is about more than providing user choice; it’s about making sense and money out of search monetization schemes. Here, more is definitely better and any scheme that increases transparency of the search terms, and the prices they fetch, can be a plus for mobile operators. (Of course, this could be bad news for the SEM firms that make millions of the differential in price between, say, Yahoo and MSN.)
I caught up with George Fraser, Managing Director – Europe, InfoSpace Mobile, for a pre-briefing to discuss the march of metasearch, the Virgin Mobile blueprint to create a “protected” rather than a walled garden, and the next stage in the raging branded/white-label search debate.
Listen to the podcast here:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
The Virgin experience: In a nutshell, Virgin has set the rules to show the portal and store results at the top, followed by WAP results and, finally, Web results. Fraser later told me that Virgin’s approach to WAP is “a kind of crawl, walk, run approach” that starts with only “a couple of hundred WAP sites.” The idea is to open access to only those sites that offer quality content and a good user experience. Put another way, the intent is to create a “protected garden.” Virgin isn’t trying to police it; they’re just making sure consumers are protected in that area and prepared for the free-for-all of the wide-open Web when they leave it.
Grey matter: Hold the phone (!) Branded search engines have been playing down the role of brand recently. (I co-chaired the mobile search conference that put this topic on the map more on this new mindset here.) What’s the impact on the branded/white-label debate. Smart marketing, but no implementation proving the branded providers walk the talk. “I’m not necessarily convinced you’re going to get [flexibility] from the other guys [branded providers]. They are B2C guys, they’ve got a standard product.Operators always want something different and I think the white-label guys are far more set up to provide different bespoke iterations of the product versus some of the bigger [branded] guys. That may change and evolve over time, but the standardised model is a one-size-fits-all.Operators don’t seem to want that [they] want something that genuinely provides them differentiation from their competitors.”
Highly recommended: InfoSpace is quietly fine-tuning its mobile search offer to emphasize recommendation and personalization thanks to an informal tie-up with Australia’s Agent Arts. (In a nutshell, Agent Arts builds content relationships between items by analyzing consumer interactions with the content through their real-time or past interests and buying behavior. The company recently added social recommendations to the mix, introducing a product which allows consumers to create and maintain public identities, browse people with similar content interests, build and manage buddy lists, and check out the trends and tastes high on the radar of so-called Alpha Users.) “Recommendation will be something that is coming down the track pretty quickly. Particularly in the music category, recommendation is something that we think is a key differentiator.” Fraser also later confided that InfoSpace is increasingly aware of the deciding role recommendation plays. In Verizon’s offer, for example, a service is provided by Medio Systems, a competitor white-label search provider.
Value-ad: Mobile advertising isn’t far away for Virgin Mobile and when the operator makes it’s move InfoSpace will have the job of “ensuring that we [the operator] get the best blended price,” Fraser says. “Our role, instead of arbitraging our search, is to bring on the best price to the customer, not to allow an SEM to make money on the arbitrage [and] to hand that money over to our customers.”
Fraser also added that another part of InfoSpace’s value-add comes through its partnership with Infogin, a company that provides Web-to-mobile content adaptation technology to mass market handsets. (BTW: I spoke with Eran Wyler, Infogin CEO, recently, to discuss the pivotal role of transcoding technology as portal walls fall and the company’s operator wins in the pipeline. Look for the complete interview this month.) According to Fraser, “early data shows that we’re [InfoSpace] trebling the amount of Web pages viewed in just the first week by having the transcoding in there.”
