@ CTIA: Mobile Research At MECCA

First session of MECCA was a discussion on the state of mobile entertainment with Seamus McAteer from M:Metrics and Paul Leakas from Nielsen Mobile…an interesting aspect was the ability to SMS in questions which are displayed on the screen tobe answered. This is much better than passing around a microphone…
There were some interesting statistics put up of course….
From M:Metrics Top 6 ringtones genres for females: (per month, I think, for the US)

• Hiphop or Rap — 2.47 million
• Rock and Alternative — 2.08 million
• Pop — 2.07 million
• Tv movie game themes — 1.37 million
• Country — 987 thousand
• Classic rock — 918 thousand

The general consensus from the analysts I’ve talked to is that women are buying most of the mobile content.
One interesting point from Nielsen — Super Mario Brothers, Badboys and Halloween theme songs have appeared on the Billboard Hot Ringtones Chart every week since its inception almost a year ago. These have a long shelf life compared to top40 hits.
They also found no definitive correlation between ringtone and digital download sales, which implies there may be a good opportunity for bundling without cannibalising either market.
M:Metrics said that game downloads are a seasonal market driven by new handset sales… “we can correlate downloads with the time frame of the introduction of new handsets”. The post-Xmas period is also big, for obvious reasons…the biggest demographic is college-age, 18-24, followed by teens…no surprises there.
The two people also said that ringtones continue to outpace digital downloads and they fulfill two different purposes, ersonalization vs listening…and also that only 12% of downloaders use venues other than the carrier deck. That’s not very good news for mobile content, but it should be remembered that US carriers only recently opened up their networks to third-party contetn, if they have at all. As mobile users start seeing mobile data as the mobile web rather than just ringtone and game downloads we should see more movement off the carriers portal.
Our CTIA/MES coverage is sponsored by Motricity: Booth 717.