Mobile Web technology provider Bango reported a huge shift in mobile content sales – with 30 percent of purchases from its growing community of content providers crossing country borders – compared to just 5 percent a year ago.
This means that the traditional way of selling mobile content country by country is fast disappearing.
The move away from a Premium SMS model to the mobile Web is behind this shift. With Premium SMS, content providers sold their content country by country, doing specific promotions and setting billing for each region they wanted to sell into.
On the mobile Web, one builds a Web site and sells content from there, promoting access to the mobile sites by search marketing, then promoting it from a PC site and in print media.
“This has significant implications in a similar way [to how] the desktop Web changed the market – it significantly increases the ease by which content is discovered and accessed on mobile worldwide, while improving the number of associated follow-on sales and repeat visits.” said Sarah Keefe, VP of marketing communications for Bango.
With more people searching for content, this trend is expected to grow to 55 percent or more within the next year.
“These numbers are extracted directly from the live Bango service,” Keefe said. “More than 13 million people from more than 150 countries around the world buy mobile content (games, ringtones, images, music tracks and information services) through mobile Web sites that are powered by Bango (e.g., World Wrestling Entertainment’s mobile site, mobile.wwe.com ), allowing us to build up an accurate picture of buying trends and behavior by analyzing visits and payment history.”
With Bango, content providers simply plug into the Bango platform once, and can collect payments from more than 150 countries worldwide on the mobile Web for one monthly fee.
Content providers often stimulate cross-border sales by publishing their mobile URL on their Web site. They then list themselves in mobile search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, or pay for sponsored links within the search results.
When businesses start selling mobile content they soon realize they have visitors from all around the world with minimal promotional effort.
” It is important to capitalize on this traffic and capture sales from their complete world-wide audience,” Keefe said. “This also highlights the importance of being able to identify the customer’s country, to price in their local currency and have local billing methods available around the world.”
