Both attendance and energy at the World Telemedia event in Prague last week were quite high, confirming my view that focussed mid-size conferences are far more effective than mega-events when it comes to networking and deal-making. And that doesn’t just go for the industry; I also negotiated agreements with several media partners, sponsors and advertisers that share my vision to make Msearchgroove the industry’s leading knowledge portal.

A special thanks to Dominic Bignall, founder and CEO of Mvolve, a company that has covered the bases to create a premiere social networking destination for the mobile industry. Msearchgroove, which has signed up as a gold sponsor for the mobile search and mobile advertising categories, will also provide the site with a tailored news feed. Together we will work to create a thinking space where the industry can meet, discuss and do business. (More about that later – along with a progress report on the involvement of this site in industry roundtables and events, and the formal launch of the Msearchgroove sponsored podcast series – when I return from Mobile Internet World in Boston on Friday.)

In the meantime, I’d like to recount some key highlights (and some scoops!) from my panel with Mark Slade, MD, 4th Screen Advertising; Bryan Stockwell, Business Development Director, Mobile Commerce; Ben Tatton-Brown, Head of Sales EMEA, Medio Systems; Ray de Silva, Strategic Business Development Manager, Vodafone UK; and Kieran O’Keefe, Sales and Marketing Director, Reporo.

YAHOO BEATS GOOGLE: That’s the word from Bryan, and he should know. His company, Mobile Commerce (MC), has moved up the value chain to search aggregation and now occupies a pivotal position between Orange and Yahoo. (Put simply, on the Orange portal there’s a search box in every WAP page, and whatever gets put into that search box is sent to MC, which then sends it on to Yahoo, which returns results for Orange to display.)

Bryan counts “about 25 million [off-portal] searches a month” in the U.K. About 70% of those are driven through the main operators who embrace search for off-portal, namely Vodafone, Orange and 3, and there is T-Mobile in there as well with their Web & Walk service with a Google search box on it.

Despite the advance of white-label solutions, Google and Yahoo appear to have the market sewn up. “The split is about 55% going to Google and 45% going to Yahoo.” But the click-through rates tell another story: “Yahoo actually outperforms Google by 9 times in terms of click-through rate.” That gap will likely close now that Vodafone have made changes to their portal to show sponsored results higher up. (BTW, Bryan gives Orange high marks for having the good sense to put sponsored links above the fold, and kudos for a “very good user experience that blends their on-portal search with off-portal.)

VODAFONE: Vodafone has fine-tuned its approach to cluster results by category and move the sponsored results above the fold. Ray reports better results and will take steps to make it easier for other companies to advertise. “The reality is inventory has been very limited because as an operator we have first of all our own store, Vodafone Live, and then we have the needs of the other storefront owners and content providers that are out there. So, we have to balance the need for real estate not only for our own offerings, but also to offer on a commercial basis to third parties…. So, there’s been exceptionally high demand.”

To solve the supply bottleneck, Vodafone is in the “process of actually productizing some of our own sponsored links to be available specifically to people who have off-portal services they want to monetize.” In practice this will allow content providers, for example someone who has mobile games that they want to be able to sell to Vodafone subscribers, to buy sponsored links directly from Vodafone.

As Ray put it: “We think that’s a really important step forward to recognizing the fact that the content market has specific needs, it doesn’t necessarily want to have to deal with people like Yahoo….” Ray said this is just one announcement of many to come – so watch this space.

POWER SHIFT: Who owns mobile search? In Ray’s view, traffic decides the winners and losers. “Ultimately, it comes down to whoever has got the most eyeballs. On mobile, the mobile operators tend to own the eyeballs because of the fact that we have gone out there and built a more interactive experience….”

Of course, Google is still one of the most popular search terms, which makes me wonder if a showdown between content providers/operators and branded mobile search/portal providers might not be inevitable.

Another possibility: It might be another destination altogether. As Ray put it: “We haven’t got it right yet, but ultimately there is a trend towards off-portal sites in terms of generating eyeballs.” An example he likes to quote is Flirtomatic, which generates over 100 million web page impressions in the U.K. a month currently. “That’s just one service, so over time I can see obviously there will be big winners in the eyeball space and they will probably not be the ones you would expect.”

(A word about Flirtomatic and some research Ray shared looking at how search rates when it comes to cost per customer acquisition (CPA). “Search was one, then banner advertising was twice on average the cost for acquiring the user and television was the next most expensive at about 17 times the cost of CPA from search and acquiring customer, and the most horrific was print and that averaged 270 times a search CPA.”)

Ben from Medio agreed that “it is all about eyeballs at the end of the day.” But he has his doubts about the power base Google & Co. currently operate from. “I think that all these partnerships that you’re seeing with operators and the likes of Yahoo and Google are short-term partnerships.” He knows of “conversations that are happening,” so the landscape is very much in a state of flux.

SEARCH AS A SERVICE: Kieran at Reporo revealed his company is also looking into offering mobile search as a service to support mobile publishers and monetize traffic on his portal. Is this a trend and will other media companies jump on the mobile-search-as-a-service among media companies?

I’ve written reams about Sesam, a Scandinavian portal provider that has super-charged its business model, by offering mobile search from white-label mobile search provider FAST, to take on and beat Google. (A browse of the Portfolio section on this site should bring up a few interesting articles, BTW.)

Medio clearly “gets” it. Its deal with CBS essentially opens up its white-label search service to content publishers and off-portal, paving the way for off-deck mobile properties to make money on mobile search. Ben walked me through Mobile Media Now, the performance-based ad network it is formally set to launch in Europe in the next few weeks. Ben tells me Medio is “serving around 20 million page impressions in the U.K.” Keep in mind that Medio is going for relevance here – so it’s about quality and not quantity. Medio lets advertisers target searchers with both banner and pay-per-click ads. In addition, advertisers have the option to manually approve each ad or auto-approve. “It’s all about giving advertisers control of the ads shown with the search results and therefore a say in the relevance,” Ben says. Inventory is sold out already in Europe – so the targeting model appears to be spot-on.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.