Content search & discovery
Winning is no longer about accumulating huge stockpiles of content; it’s about helping users find what they like – perhaps even before they know what they want. Peggy Anne Salz examines the race among operators and content owners to enable mobile search and encourage content discovery.
Smart retailers know that they can drive sales by placing hot-selling items where consumers can see them. Operators, however, put the burden of finding content squarely on users’ shoulders, forcing them to navigate confusing menus and sift through catalogues to find the content they want to purchase.
Recent usability studies argue this modus operandi not only results in an unsatisfactory end-user experience; it is the chief reason why content sales continue to disappoint. Mobile devices – with their screen-size limitations and restricted input capabilities – only exacerbate the problem.
Indeed, a new survey of UK consumers, commissioned by web hosting provider Hostway, found that nearly three quarters of users still don’t access the Internet from their mobile phones because of problems associated with displaying or navigating the content. Common sense – and a rule of thumb in the fixed Internet – dictates that content providers generally lose half of their audience to frustration or boredom with every additional click it takes users to find and purchase content they want.
Research by companies, including Sweden’s Mobile Matrix and Informa Telecoms & Media, show the vast majority of content is invisible to users because it is buried deep in confusing – often times counter-intuitive – hierarchical menus and positioned too many clicks from the portal home page. A recent Informa benchmarking study found that users typically have to click through 10-40 screens, and spend more than two minutes to download some of the most popular ringtones or games.
To complicate matters, the exponential rise of direct-to-consumer content schemes – that effectively bypass the operator portals to sell content to users – turns up pressure on all players in the mobile industry to make finding and buying content a no-brainer.
Against this backdrop, it is no wonder operators and content providers are scrambling to boost their search capabilities. To this end Vodafone and T-Mobile have teamed up with search engine giant Google. More recently, NTT DoCoMo selected nine partners – including MSN – for its new keyword search feature. Located at the top of the i-Mode homepage, the service enables users to search the some 6,200 official i-Mode sites as well as the wider Web.
Short-cut to content
Yahoo! has also established an impressive presence in the space, delivering its mix of entertainment, messaging and search services to operators including Cingular, Sprint and Rogers in the U.S. In Europe Yahoo! sealed a world-first global agreement with 3 Group, in July 2006, to provide services such as Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mobile Web, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Go for Mobile, a client application Yahoo! will deliver on 3 devices.
In addition to taking the top-notch position as the default Internet search engine on 3 handsets and on Planet 3, the operator’s mobile portal, Yahoo! will also transcode Web content for optimized delivery and presentation on mobile phones.
“It’s not just about providing search; it’s about content adaptation and providing [users] a quality experience when they visit the pages connected with the search results,” says Mark Joseph, 3 head of content products. “The key is bringing services to the mobile in a way that works and in a way that is familiar to users in terms of their experience in the fixed-line environment.” For 3, this translates into branded search, properly rendered pages and services that allow users to connect around content.
Yahoo! will also deliver a mix of on-portal content offers promoting 3’s own content partners and the wider Web in search results. The business model will first focus on making the content offered by 3’s some 300 content partners easier to find, says Geraldine Wilson, vice president of Connected Life, Yahoo! Europe, the business group responsible for the company’s “beyond the browser” strategy.
Moving forward, the focus will be on generating additional revenues from mobile advertising, sponsored search and other models that combine content and promotion. “As we design the monetization model, we will focus on preparing 3 content first, then on paid placements and then on the wider Web,” Wilson says.
Getting personal
Mobile search is indisputably a potent way to generate value. Users find what they want, marketers gain traffic by providing offers and advertising with the search results and mobile operators and service providers capture more revenue from increased mobile content purchases.
However, operators and content owners are also turning to software solutions to automate and personalize the delivery and display of mobile content directly on users’ mobile phones. This new breed of so-called on-device portal providers – whose ranks have swelled to some 20 vendors in the last 18 months including Abaxia, Action Engine, Alatto, Cibenix, Nellymoser, Onskreen, Openwave, Qualcomm, RefreshMobile, Silk, SurfKitchen and Zi Corporation – deliver users 24/7 direct access to content as well as updates, promotions and special offers.
More importantly, because they are located directly on the user’s device, these solutions make it easier for users to understand access and discover mobile services and content. A prime example is Alatto Tribes, a solution that effectively turns the phone into a “something akin to a TV remote control,” according to Neil Flanagan, Alatto CEO. With Tribes users can zap between content with the click of a button, feedback that allows operators and content providers to bundle services to match their tastes and deliver users more of the content they like and less of what they don’t.
Another company convinced of the power of content discovery is NMS Communications, a US-based provider of technologies and solutions for mobile applications and infrastructure, best known for its MyCaller ringback offer. Using the insights the company has gained into user purchases and preferences, NMS is gearing up to enable customers to deliver users relevant content before they ask for it through a solution that combines software on the device and intelligence in the network.
“If a user chooses a Black Eyed Peas ringback tone, then they are raising their hand and saying ‘I’m a fan.’ It’s a signal to the operator to ask if the user might not also like a screensaver, a ringtone or tickets to an upcoming concert,” explains Mark Grindeland, vice president and general manager of NMS Communications’ Mobile Applications business. “All of a sudden we have a contextually relevant offer and the operator can engage users in a dialogue instead of spamming them.” The pitch is also more likely to end in a sale because it delivers relevant content to the user instead of forcing the users to search trial-and-error through a list of links.
“The challenge for operators, as they roll out more services, is getting users to find out about them let alone use them,” Grindeland says. Rather than wait for users to ask, providers need to serve up content that is timely and relevant to the user. “The exciting opportunity is the impulse buy – and that’s what discovery delivers.”
Search & Discovery 2.0
Is mobile search a must-have for operators and content providers to monetize their content? Or will content discovery schemes clinch the sale? While some observers believe the approaches compete head-on, a new report from Informa Telecoms & Media, Mobile Search & Content Discovery, argues that they are both characteristics of winning content services and sales strategies going forward.
While search does assist in delivering a better end-user experience, “search paired with personalization and recommendation is a much more powerful combination,” the report says. The lucrative business opportunity is in combining these capabilities to provide users with personalized and relevant results – as well as the tools to discover content they might not have otherwise known existed.
An increasing number of companies – as well as search engine providers – can read the writing on the wall. They have developed or deployed artificial intelligence and other technologies to collect and collate the clues users leave such as usage patterns, content preferences and download history to match the right content with the right user.
Many others have harnessed so-called recommendation engines to deliver users relevant content. This technology – modeled on the approach of online bookseller Amazon – suggests content on the basis of the individual user’s past preferences or on the basis of what a user’s peers consumed, or both.
Recommendations based on customer information such as page views and downloads will be an important part of content-selling strategies going forward. But it may well be the recommendations from the tight-knit communities users know and trust that matter most.
Indeed, a recent survey from Jupiter Research shows 64% of users will try a service or content recommended by a friend, and 69% will pass what they like along to between two and six friends.
Against this backdrop, the real power of search and discovery may be about much more than encouraging users to interact with content; it may be about enabling them to create mobile communities around the content they seek and share together.