Finding Things on the Mobile Internet

Research firm M:Metrics, which measures consumer consumption of mobile content and applications, and benchmarks the performance of carriers, handset manufacturers, platform vendors, media companies and others, recently kicked launched its blog. The firm is a great source for all types of industry data and observations such as:

The number of people (in the U.S.) that pay for wallpapers is close to the number that downloads a game -- about 6 million. Ringtones are a healthy market with about 18 mil. downloading a tone.

One of the difficulties M:Metrics notes in a recent post is the tremendous amount of content, applications and services available to U.S. mobile subscribers, and the challenge network operators and content publishers have in promoting it to get consumers to discover and purchase. For example:

If you're a Cingular subscriber you can choose from over 300 games to buy! If you're on Verizon you have over 350 games to choose from! Choice! It's great. But making this choice requires you to spend more time browsing the catalog than average mobile game would take to play.

As I've discussed on an earlier posts, the industry has to do a better job of educating consumers and promoting what is available on their data networks if they want to drive usage and revenue. Lowering the cost of entry to the networks might be a good start....

via M:Metrics