How content providers can profit from mobile search on- and off-portal

October 15, 2008

Stephen Burke is the Tokyo-based senior vice president of marketing for MCN Inc.

By Stephen Burke

Mobile users don't buy what they can't find and content providers can't survive if they have to spend more of their marketing budgets on costly, imprecise mass media and Web promotions.

This is especially true as the trend from on-portal content sales to off-portal accelerates in the United. States and as new mobile commerce initiatives get under way.

In the early days of the mobile Web, operators -- rightly -- sought to control content access within "walled gardens" to ensure reliability and a common user experience.

Content providers lined up to get "on deck," creating pileups in carrier waiting rooms.

With recent advances in network capacity, data pricing, devices, applications, and standards, the U.S. is poised to rapidly follow the trends set in Japan and Britain, where the ratio of on- and off-portal content discovery has flipped in the past two years and off- portal sites now dominate traffic.

Even more dramatic, in Japan, is the growth of mobile commerce, which overtook mobile content sales in 2007 and will generate nearly $6 billion in revenue this year versus $3 billion in mobile content revenues.

How will U.S. content and ecommerce providers profit?

By grabbing space in the emerging "Mobile Malls" that are being deployed by carriers and portals.

Mobile Malls that are building clear pathways -- on the phone top and the WAP portal -- to information search powered by Web giants like Google and Yahoo, as well as to high value "search merchandising services.

Search merchandising services leverage new technical advances like federated search and new content promotion programs that reach users at the moment of highest interest in a transaction.

Federated search solutions create direct connections to any content sources (on- and off- portal) in real-time, and in any number of vertical content channels (Music, Video, Games, Shopping, etcetera).

Queries are brokered out to relevant sources, and actionable content items -- not endless links -- are presented to the user in two to three clicks, ranked and sorted in terms of relevance and value.

Federated search combined with new performance based PPC content promotion programs like MCN allwords paid search listings reach users directly at the instant they want to buy cool stuff with their phone.

With allwords, content providers simplify promotion and increase ROI by buying all of the keywords in a content category with one purchase.

This eliminates costly and complex keyword bidding and campaign management and ensures that if the content provider's database has a piece of content relevant to the query it will be presented to users who are primed to buy.

Shorter click distance + relevant content items (not links) = higher click throughs, conversions and ROI

With Federated search and PPC content promotion at their disposal, content providers can manage SEO within their own databases, leverage limited marketing budgets directly against users at the moment of highest interest in a transaction, and maintain a profitable position in high traffic Mobile Malls.

Stephen Burke is the Tokyo-based senior vice president of marketing for MCN Inc., a mobile search platform provider. Reach him at .