Will Mobile Ad Revenue Drive Mobile Entertainment?
We have already posted IAMAI report, Mobile VAS is already a big business and growing at a rate of 70% year-on-year. Atleast 35% of the Mobile VAS revenues are contributed by Music, mostly CRBT and Ringtone downloads. November, 2008’s mobile usage report of opera reflects the obvious that Mobile entertainment business is going to have good times ahead. Gamejump.com, the mobile gaming network and Songs.pk, the illegal MP3 download site figure in the top 10 accessed websites and both of them are ad-supported. Though there are significant revenues in the VAS space there are revenue challenges here as there is uneven revenue share existent between the VAS providers and the operators (highly skewed in favour of operators).
Mobile advertisement might just prove to be the right solution for this tussle, though not big enough right now to provide enough revenues to the VAS providers the advent of 3G and thus the increased adoption of mobile internet will for sure boost the mobile ad revenues.
Times internet might have wanted to grab a good share of this nascent business. Times Internet Ltd has launched India’s first mobile entertainment search engine, TIL claims this is the easiest and fastest way to search for multi-media content of your favorite celebrity, across ring tones, wallpapers, games, animation etc. TIL is using mobile ad’s for revenue generation, which seems like an obvious choice for the business model.
Only time will tell how soon does mobile advertising become a money spinner for VAS players. There is also MNP which could change the game provided its executed well in Indua.
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I am not sure how much mobile ad revenue will drive the entertainment. If you see, currently a ringtone download costs Rs 10. A targeted advertisement with that download can at the max give you a revenue of 1 rupee. This revenue has to be shared between content publisher, technology driver, operator & consumer. I am not sure what will be the incentive for the user to see this… You don’t download a ringtone every day to accumulate your savings over a period of time to get it to some significant number.
I think mobile ad will be driven by internet and free content..
@Rohit
I guess the ad-revenue will only go to the content provider, isn’t it?