By Lai Kok Fung, CEO, BuzzCity
At BuzzCity, we’ve been doing our homework – conducting a systematic survey of myGamma’s users across multiple countries, studying user profiles, interacting with our members on a one-to-one basis, consulting with university academics who research media consumption habits.
And now we’re putting our findings into action. We’re in the final stages of designing myGamma 2.0. Watch for the launch in February.
Let me share with you the thought process that has brought us to this stage.
Mobile Social Networking – Who does it?
When BuzzCity first entered the world of mobile social networking, we figured – like most people – that our users would be well-heeled professionals and trendy youth from affluent societies. These are the consumers who buy the latest phones and gadgets, the people that marketers want to reach, right?
We could not have been more wrong.
Regular readers of this blog know that myGamma’s members are largely individuals who do not have regular access to PCs, people like Liton (a 27 year old airport worker in Bangladesh), Alanleic (a crossing-keeper in the UK) and Sandy (an overseas Filipina caregiver in Israel), all of whom have been featured in previous columns.
Liton, Alanleic and Sandy – like most myGamma users – are not rich. They’re in the lower to middle income groups, what industry observers and academics are now calling the “bottom of the pyramid”. Emerging markets account for more than half the world’s total telecom connections, and according to Gartner, this will rise to 69 percent by 2010. The GSM Association believes that the next billion subscribers will come from the bottom of the pyramid.
Most myGamma members are also over the age of 20. Sixty-five percent are in their twenties. Just ten percent are teenagers. They come from emerging markets or work in blue-collar jobs in industrialised countries. In October, the countries with the highest myGamma usage were India, Indonesia and South Africa. MyGamma now has two million users from 60 countries. Another two countries come online every month.
Why enter a mobile community? We organised a session of BuzzCity-NUS Digital Media Forum a few weeks ago with presentation by Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, who leads a regional ICT policy group called LIRNEasia. His group had a done a study across five Asian nations – India, Pakistan, The Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand – and asked people the main reason why they use a mobile phone.
The pace and style of life in The Philippines is vastly different from Sri Lanka; India and Thailand have little in common other than a taste for spicy foods. Yet across these five countries, the number one reason why people use a mobile phone is the same: to stay connected with friends and family. “Staying connected” ranks consistently ahead of doing business or delivering messages.
myGamma's users express similar sentiments. People join our mobile communities to connect and share experiences with new friends. Like other communities – both real and virtual – myGamma provides members with a sense of belonging, acceptance and appreciation. Features like testimonials, the Hall of Fame and virtual marriage enhance these feelings.
Dignity and Choice
Why do some ventures that target the lower middle class fail? Often it’s because the items for sale are too cheap or the project appears like charity. Nobody wants to be treated like a charity-case. The poor want dignity. They want to move up the social and economic ladder.
Muhammad Yunus (“Banker to the Poor”) and Krishna Rao Prahalad ( “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” ) have written extensively about how the lower income groups should not be treated as victims but instead should be seen as creative entrepreneurs and value-conscious consumers.
To many at the bottom of the pyramid, the mobile internet is a great equaliser. It’s proof that they are moving up the social ladder. myGamma is empowering and improving people’s lives.
Mobile Networking 2.0
The next generation myGamma platform has new communities – like sports, health and entertainment – that enable and encourage our users to better interact with each other. BuzzCity editors will showcase a different community each month and the featured topics will resonate with our members’ interests and lifestyles.
The tools are already there, but in myGamma 2.0 each new community will have its own blogs, groups and original content. By visiting these new communities, myGamma’s users will meet people with similar interests and connect with like-minded individuals.
myGamma 2.0 is a place to make and connect with friends, an environment where you can share day-to-day experiences at work, at home and at play.
We’re also opening up the gates. We’ve decided to eliminate subscription fees and day/week pass charges. Membership is going to be free. Users will still purchase Gamma dollars if they want to buy virtual items, vote for each other or download premium content provided by our partners. But we expect the bulk of myGamma’s revenue to come from advertising.
By delivering value to consumers – providing our users with a sense of community and belonging as well as access to information that they can use to improve their lives – myGamma’s population will continue to grow, which in turn enables us to provide value to advertisers. Welcome to myGamma 2.0, where the mobile-centric internet meets the needs of the “unwired”.
By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)
Five billion. It’s a large number. Five followed by nine zeros.
5,000,000,000. Five billion is
* our sun’s supply of hydrogen, as measured in years.
* the number of text messages sent in Britain each month.
* the number of people worldwide without access to the internet.
It’s also the number of advertising pageviews delivered by BuzzCity since the start of the year.
Not bad for a company that only started selling ads towards the end of 2006. Since then, we’ve delivered 125 million clicks and worked on over 3000 advertising campaigns. Take a look at the graph and you can see the growth. In the fourth quarter of last year, the bars barely registered on the chart. In the third quarter of 2007, we served 2 billion ads. One-third of the pageviews were in sub-Saharan Africa. The next biggest region served was South Asia.
Advertisers have increasingly sophisticated demands. Agencies need the ability to optimise campaigns faster and better, so BuzzCity is constantly upgrading our systems and capabilities to meet their needs. Here are three ways we are helping businesses get a better return on every advertising dollar:
1. Device Targeting
Some advertisers only want to target users with a particular type of phone or operating system. Gaming companies, for example, may develop games that only work on Java-based systems. So it doesn't make sense for them to spend money on ads that appear on phones that don't support Java.
To support these needs, BuzzCity is launching a string of new targeting capabilities in December. These include more phone models, operating systems and telephone features. Our advertisers have already been able to specify ads for Nokia, Sony Ericcson, Motorola, Samsung and Sagem users. Now, add Blackberry and Palm/Handspring to the list.
In addition, they can specify operating systems and telephone features.
Operating Systems : MIDP1.0, MIDP2.0, Symbian v8 and below, Symbian v9, Windows Mobile (Pocket PC), Windows Mobile (Smartphone)
Phone Features: Flash Player (Flashlite), MP3, Full Music Player (MP3, AAC, WMA), Real Player, WCDMA (UMTS, 3G) and xHTML Browser.
2. Carrier Targeting
Sometimes advertisers partner with specific telecom carriers, so they only want their ads to reach those carriers' customers. Other times, carriers want to reach out to their own -- or their competitors' -- subscribers. In the new world of targeted advertising, this is possible. With a simple online form, advertisers can specify which group of cell-phone users should view their ads.
3. XML FeedsThese provide advertisers with up-to-date information about their campaigns, so they can make adjustments as needed to get the best return from every campaign.
The growth in mobile advertising that BuzzCity has experienced this year is part of a larger industry trend. Most people in the mobile space agree that ads -- not fees for downloading ringtones, wallpapers and other services -- will drive the mobile internet. Search and ad companies like Yahoo! and Google are working hard to secure footholds in the mobile space. This month, Yahoo! signed deals with nine Asian telecom carriers -- including Digi.com (Malaysia), PCCW (Hong Kong) and StarHub (Singapore) -- nearly doubling its mobile reach.
And market analysts are predicting mobile ad revenues will jump up to ten-fold over the next several years. eMarketer is forecasting a US$5 billion mobile ad spend in the US by 2011. ABI Research expects the global market to hit US$19 billion.
The key is relevant and interesting mobile content. As more and more content for the mobile internet rolls out, we'll see further jumps in mobile ads. And BuzzCity is ready.
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IN OTHER NEWS
And the winner is . . .
* BuzzCity has been named a Red Herring Global 100 Finalist. Award winners will be announced on 3 December.
* BuzzCity has been named "Best Mobile Social Networking Service" at the 2007 GSMA Asia Mobile Awards!
* BuzzCity is now serving two more European countries: Denmark and The Netherlands.
By Hisham Isa, Vice President (Marketing)
Over the past year, BuzzCity has received a lot of mail from advertisers – particularly US and European companies – that want to target mobile consumers in the UK. We probably receive at least one new enquiry every week.
And frankly, I’ve been at a loss as to why advertisers were so keen.
You see, there’s a fair amount of mobile internet traffic on the portals of telecom carriers like Vodafone and Orange, but off-portal traffic to third party sites is pretty slim. And without sufficient mobile traffic, it’s difficult for companies like ours to service advertiser requests.
INTERNET BOOMNow, though, after spending a few days with internet marketers at the AdTech conference in London, I get it. There’s tremendous enthusiasm in the UK for online marketing and this is spilling over to the mobile space.
• Britain’s top media brands – BBC, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, The Independent, Playboy, The Sun and The Times – are increasingly investing time, cash and energy to digitalise their offerings.
• More and more interactive ad agencies are specialising in internet search.
• UK businesses are conducting more mobile campaigns, though these are primarily SMS or WAP push.
The biggest piece of news, though, is that last year, for the first time, UK advertisers spent more on the internet than they did in newspapers. In fact, the UK internet ad spend jumped 40 percent from a year earlier to top 2 billion pounds. This year, market analysts expect the ad spend to top 2.7 billion pounds. That’s definitely not a paltry sum.
WHERE’S THE MOBILE MARKET?With such impressive turnover in the fixed line internet market, advertisers expect mobile internet use in the UK to be high as well.
Unfortunately, that’s not the reality yet.
One problem is that it’s still difficult for British mobile phone users to surf outside the portal of their mobile carrier. You need to make a request first and there are a lot of configuration issues. Then, if you do figure out how to access third-party sites, watch out for the high data charges. Furthermore, from an advertiser’s perspective, banner ads have yet to penetrate the UK mobile market.
On the positive side, the British carriers are starting to educate their users about mobile surfing. Vodafone, for example, enables customers to edit MySpace pages from a phone. And Orange is selling widgets for services like instant messaging and mapping.
GOING FORWARD
BuzzCity currently serves more than 5 million ad impressions per month in the UK and this figure is growing at a rate of about 10 percent a month. The UK myGamma community has 13,000 users, with about 500+ joining the ranks every month.
Beyond our own data, there are no readily available figures for the UK mobile ad spend. This might be because the market is too small or perhaps because most of the ad dollars are going to operator portals. There are numbers though for the number of British users who access the web from a mobile device: 15 million per month.
Social networking is huge in the UK and many believe these sites will be the main driver behind mobile internet usage. Nearly 4 in 5 surfers belong to a social networking community. And the average British surfer spends 5.8 hours per month on Facebook, mySpace, Bebo, etc - about double the time spent by surfers in Germany and triple that of French users.
All the major social networking sites are moving into the mobile space. mySpace has tied up with Vodafone. Bebo has a contract with Orange. Facebook, though, is moving beyond the carriers by launching a mobile site that is accessible to all. One reviewer writes:
"What’s great about the site is the way it focuses on the key bits of information and content that you might want to access on the go – you can tell someone’s thought hard about how and why someone might use Facebook on their phone."
Most industry observers argue that the spillover of social networking sites like Facebook into the mobile space and the introduction of flat rate pricing are the most important changes needed to foster the growth of the mobile internet.
At BuzzCity, though, we don't believe that web brands translate well into WAP. So while we're pleased to see companies like Facebook offering off-portal services, we don't expect these to be a main driver of the industry.
As for flat rate pricing, UK carriers are now offering 1GB or so of bandwidth at fairly reasonable rates. T-mobile's "web and walk" service, for example, costs 7.5 pounds per month. Half a million consumers have signed up.
Now, media providers need to make more and more content available via WAP. Content attracts users and users attract advertisers. The publishers and content providers that we spoke with during the recent AdTech conference in London tell us that they are developing WAP sites. But it will likely be another 9 – 12 months before we really see more WAP activity and a significant up-tick in the UK mobile space.
(Note: The photo of British mobile phone users was taken earlier this year for The Daily Mail.)
By Lai Kok Fung, BuzzCity CEO
In my hometown of Singapore, Africa barely makes the news and when it does the headlines are invariably bad: war, genocide, natural disasters, poverty and AIDS. But this past week, during a visit to Johannesburg, I saw a different Africa – a place of opportunity, an upwardly mobile Africa where cell phones are making a very real positive impact on people’s lives.
