Join The Next Wave - Buy A Ring Tone
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday July 5, 2001
E-commerce? Give it up. You'll spend millions pioneering new online markets, only to lose out to something as silly as mobile phone ring tones.
Modern consumers just don't seem to know what's good for them. Build them a nice online department store or Internet auction service or Web-based radio station and what do they do? Waste their time downloading Darth Vader theme songs and Pokemon logos for their mobile phones.
The two leading Australian Web portals, Ninemsn and Yahoo, recently caught on to this market. It's niche but so is e-commerce. And at least ring tones, logos and picture messages for mobile phones are actually making money. Literally tens of thousands are downloaded each month from Ninemsn, which licenses the service from iTouch, a British mobile data provider majority-owned by Mr Tony O'Reilly's Independent News & Media. At an average cost of $2 to $5 per download, the revenue proposition is clear.
This week Yahoo Australia & NZ announced a similar deal with iTouch, after watching the word ``ringtone" zoom in popularity on its search engine. ``Ringtone" is now among the top 25 words searched for on Yahoo.com.au.
Along with SMS messages, ring tones have been one of the few commercial successes for consumer-oriented mobile data providers.
Mobile phone companies such as Telstra, C&W Optus and Vodafone are hoping it is more than a fad. These telcos will each spend something like $1.5 billion to $2 billion over the next few years building and marketing new mobile phone networks designed for mobile commerce (m-commerce) data services. Even the smallest sign of a return on investment is to be warmly welcomed.
``I don't think it's a passing thing," said iTouch's Australian chief, Mr Clifford Rosenberg. ``The ring tones and graphics are fairly basic at the moment, but you are starting to see animated screensavers, colour screens, and ultimately MP3s (compressed sound recordings) will be downloaded.
``I can see it as a first step for m-commerce. People are downloading something onto their mobile phones and paying for it. I've been saying for years, keep the solutions nice, simple and easy and add a fun component and consumers will move towards it."
However, Gartner/G2 senior analyst Mr Guy Cranswick says a broader uptake of mobile data services over the next two years will be slow. ``Applications to acquire customers may be faddish as Japan's NTT DoCoMo [mobile phone company] is learning, and only hit a segment of the total market successfully such as teens and young adults.
``With Australia's population, a business can't depend on small scale niche markets to run successfully."
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
