Glider Gun

The MDA kindly organised a gathering at the Royal Statistical Society yesterday to discuss how the mobile internet can make money.

In keeping with the venue, here are a few stats – I’ll leave the comment for a later date:

• Vodafone’s worldwide data revenue is up 43%  year on year, and is at the same level as SMS was in 2003 (Terence Eden, Vodafone)
• 20% of UK mobile users are mobile internet users (Royal Statitics Socety)
• Vodafone India acquire 1.6M customers per month (Terence Eden)
• 50% of UK 9 year olds have a mobile (Alex Meisl, Sponge)
• Autotrader’s mobile site for 6M impressions in March ’09 (Alex Meisl, Sponge)
• Green Thing’s campaign on Blyk went from 5% WAP clickthrough to 11%-22% (Richard Warren, FirstPartner)
• Mobile advertising spend in Europe is expected to grow to €950M by 2012 (Richard Warren, FirstPartner)
• UK mobile advertising should go from €50M to €220M in 2013 (Richard Warren, FirstPartner)
• A few iteresting figures from the delightful Mark Curtis from Flirtomatic:
  • Flirtomatic are now over 1.3M UK users
  • Revenues is over $10 per month per spending customer ($1.50 ARPU overall)
  • They achieve 160M pages per month on mobile (a lot more than Autotrader)
  • Users exchange 30M messages per month
  • In 2008 they earnt $2.6M from premium services
  • The Strongbow campaign on Flirtomatic, allowing users to send pints to each other for free, achieved a 10% clickthrough rate
  • On May 1st, when Vodafone allowed free data to pre-pay customers, Flirtomatc’s acquisitions went up x13
  • 2 years ago, Flirto got 3500 new users by advertising on the 3 portal for 3 hours (mirrored by similar experiences we had at Future Platforms)
• 3 UK customers used 34M Skype minutes in Jan ’09 (Rory Maguire, 3)
• 18% of Facebook’s mobile users are on Three (Rory Maguire, 3)
• 21,557 Bebo mobile users are on 3 (Rory Maguire, 3)
• 27% of 3 customers download content, 45% have used MMS (Rory Maguire, 3)

And here are a few interesting quotes:

 ”As mobile internet grows, it will move off portal” – Richard Warren, FirstPartner [but will it just move to other portals like iTunes, Ovi, Google?]

 ”mobile advertising takes you to a mobile site at best, it really needs transactions integrated at the end” – Richard Warren, FirstPartner [while we wait for mCommerce, mobile apps may be good candidates as mechanics for retaining a consumer's attention]

“There is more VALUE in meeting new people then reconnecting with people you already know” – Mark Curtis, Flirtomatic [i.e. people are more likely to pay for Flirtomatic or LinkedIn than for Facebook or Bebo]