Churn, ARPU worry mobile content expert

By Mickey Alam Khan

April 3, 2008

Show floor traffic at CTIA Wireless

LAS VEGAS – In his long career in the wireless industry, Nick Montes realized that people want to do three things with the mobile phone: make calls, save time and kill time.

That wisdom drives Mr. Montes in his job as president of Viva Vision, a Santa Monica, CA-based provider of slide-show and video applications and content to wireless carriers such Verizon Wireless. He is one of 40,000 executives attending the ongoing CTIA Wireless 2008 conference and shared his thoughts on this year’s event with Mobile Marketer’s Mickey Alam Khan.

“Personally I think this show was a little better than the one in September [the CTIA IT show]. There’s tremendous amount of discussion on some common themes – open access seems to be a buzzword. I personally think it’s a press event at this point and it’ll be a couple of years before you truly see open access in full force.

“There’s a debate on where the market is from a downloadable content perspective. So there’s certain content categories that are doing better than the others, but there are significant categories that are not growing as fast as the others, so there are concerns.

“So ringtones, wallpapers and games are flat for Q4 of last year compared to Q4 the year before, 2006. So CTIA also released the numbers. The interesting thing is that if you looked at quarter over quarter, there was more data revenues in the first half of ’07 as compared to the second half of ’07.

“And so, that leads the question of where is the mobile content industry today and what’s going to change that? Does that mean the market’s stagnant or will it grow?

“My personal belief is that the carriers have to do a better job this year to work with the ecosystem so that it can help them drive incremental ARPU [average revenue per user] and decrease churn.

“This year is going to be an interesting year for carriers because the growth they’ve experienced in the last five years is not there. Penetration levels are at 77 percent and so, as a result, the biggest discussions internally at carriers is how can we get more money from our existing base on ARPU and how can we hold on to as many customers as we can.

“So it’s churn and ARPU – that’s the name of the game.”