And accounts for 10% of all singles sales
Just a year after launching its music download service in anger, 3 UK says it now has 10% of the entire UK singles market – physical and digital combined.
Graeme Oxby, marketing director of 3 UK, said that the mobile company was now so important to music companies that it had the potential to break acts, purely by promoting them on its music site. He also said that when the music industry allows video downloads to be included in its chart information, the company would be able to claim a 20% slice of the UK singles market.
As well as market leadership in mobile music, the company was also number one in mobile gaming, mobile TV and entertainment, Oxby claimed,
Other recent multimedia launches have seen similar success, he added said. Just ten weeks after launching a free MSN Messenger for mobile service, the company has seen 100 million messages carried on its network. And it has also seen 30 million Yahoo! For mobile searches in the same period of time.
“That’s 130 million extra transactions on the network,” Oxby commented. Although these services are free (albeit limited to 200 messages free messages a day for prepay users), Oxby and his ceo Bob Fuller told Mobile Europe that the advantage in such an approach is increased customer loyalty, reduced churn, and increased cross promotional opportunities with fixed internet companies and services.
The company also claimed that its user-generated communities, Kink Kommunity and See Me TV, were generating great usage numbers.
See Me TV, which pays contributors to the site if their clips are watched enough, is generating 1.25 million downloads a month, and the operator is making some substantial payouts to users. “There are some people out there paying their mortgages through this thing,” Oxby said. Kink has 52,000 subscribers generating about 350,000 messages a month.
Mobile TV content from ITV and other areas has also proved that people will pay to watch TV on their mobiles, Oxby said.
Sales figures
Although he refused to break out exact numbers, Fuller said that the company’s multimedia revenues were about half of GCap Media’s annual revenues, which we reckon makes 3 UK’s non-voice and text revenues about £110 million annually.
Fuller also said that about 25% of the company’s revenues were non-voice. As voice does about £1 billion a year for 3UK, that means total non-voice revenues of around £320 million. With multimedia accounting for (we think) £110 million of that, then we may be able to deduce that SMS income accounts for the remaining £220 million or so.
Fuller and Oxby reckoned that the operator was now far enough ahead of its competitors in understanding mobile retail and content that it could sustain its number one position in video, music, gaming and TV for months to come.
The company is also moving to a more direct sales model, and reckons that by the end of the year it will be able to generate about half its sales directly, from about a third at the moment. It says that having a suitable number of its own shops gives it a unique chance to showcase its content and multimedia offerings within the stores.