Monthly Archives: May 2008

Microsoft Announces Display Advertising on Windows Live for Mobile Services plus Mobile Search Advertising

During advance08, Microsoft’s online advertising leadership forum held in Redmond, the company announced that display advertising (banner ads) was now available across two Windows Live for mobile services, and also “the launch of new markets for Windows Live for mobile services and upcoming advertising plans for its Live Search Mobile offering.”

Advertisers from France, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. can now buy banner ads that will be displayed acorss Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail.

“This builds upon Microsoft’s initial launch of mobile advertising for MSN Mobile in, France, , Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. where mobile ads are available alongside premium MSN Mobile content. Advertising on Windows Live for mobile is already available in Spain, and later this month will be available in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, further extending its availability for advertisers. All ads placed on these two popular services will adhere to Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) guidelines.”

Microsoft also announced that it plans to expand its mobile sponsored links offers on Live Search Mobile in the second half of 2008. A beta is currently available in the U.S.

The press release is available here.

Opera Mini Report: WAP is Dead Again, Social Networks Dominate Traffic

Opera published some very interesting data yesterday regarding Opera Mini users’ habits. They looked at aggregate and anonymous traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Key findings of the report are that:

– Opera Mini users go mainly to social networking sites, it accounts for almost 41% of traffic. Those sites are either desktop websites that people want to access from their phones (ie. Facebook), or sites specifically designed for use on a mobile phone. (ie. MocoSpace).

– More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March to browse 2.4 billion pages. Thus far, more than 44 million cumulative users have tried Opera Mini.

– “One Web will triumph over WAP content:” translate: “WAP is dead”: Opera reports that “full” web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic, and traffic to WAP sites has declined. Well, that’s no surprise, Opera Mini users are aware that they can browse desktop websites from their phone so they prefer to do so, but remember that there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, and a large part of them access more to mobile sites than full websites, since they mostly use the native WAP browser pre-installed on their phone.

So unless every mobile user downloads Opera Mini or buy a high end phone, WAP (WML) and mobile sites will still be used in majority.

– Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Also included in the report is a snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini ranked by usage, you can see that most of the top countries are not the richest ones, which again proves that developing countries represent a major opportunity in terms of mobile services.

Snapshot: China

  • Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.
  • E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Top 10 sites in China

China
  1. www.sina.com
  2. www.baidu.com
  3. www.google.cn
  4. www.ko.cn
  5. news.sohu.com
  6. www.xiaonei.com
  7. www.3g.cn
  8. www.paojiao.com
  9. www.188bet.com
  10. www.feiku.com

Snapshot: United States

  • More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

United States
  1. www.myspace.com
  2. www.google.com
  3. www.mocospace.com
  4. www.yahoo.com
  5. www.facebook.com
  6. www.live.com
  7. www.hi5.com
  8. www.wikipedia.org
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.ebay.com

Snapshot: United Kingdom

  • The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

Top 10 sites in the U.K.

United Kingdom
  1. www.facebook.com
  2. www.google.co.uk
  3. www.live.com
  4. www.bebo.com
  5. www.mocospace.com
  6. news.bbc.co.uk
  7. uk.yahoo.com
  8. www.itsmy.com
  9. www.faceparty.com
  10. www.ebay.co.uk

Opera Mini: The Cheaters’ Choice?

Today, Opera announced the public availability of the latest version of Opera Mini (4.1). See the press release here.

The press release explains the new features available and cites Opera’s CEO saying that more than 44 million people have downloaded Opera Mini so far.

There’s also a citation from one user which is rather funny. It’s from a student from Lithuania:

“Opera Mini 4.1 is just great,” says RamÅ«nas Monkevičius, a student from Lithuania. “I use it at school to find information on Wikipedia, […]it really helps me at school. I can just save my Wikipedia pages and access them whenever I need to. My history grades improved drastically, thanks to Opera Mini.”

Did the guy just say that Opera Mini was an innovative technique for cheating at school? O_o I believe so 🙂

AdMob Launches Free Mobile Analytics Solution

AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising networks, has recently announced the launch of AdMob Analytics, a free mobile web analytics solution.

According to the press release, the main features will be:

“The AdMob Analytics suite allows mobile site owners to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics”

” AdMob Mobile Analytics will also provide site owners visibility into their sources of traffic including search engines, direct traffic and advertising. Combined with the ability to track conversion of the specific events and actions that the campaign seeks to drive, this enables measurement of campaign performance”

I wonder what is AdMob’s definition of “unique visitor”. Unlike on the desktop Internet ecosystem, the mobile Internet doesn’t allow the use of cookies or Javascript on all mobile devices. To my knowledge, the only reliable way to identify unique visitors is by using it’s MSISDN, which is only retrievable by carriers or mobile billing companies such as Bango (which are linked to carriers).

AdMob Analytics is not open to the public yet, you need to request an invite for their beta version on the site.

I cannot say much about the service since I haven’t tested it yet and they aren’t many information on the site. But that’s good to see someone launching a free mobile analytics solution, this will help marketers and mobile site owners get useful information about their visitors, and tune their sites to improve user experiences.