TELECOMS & MOBILE
Local mobile search use to rocket
29-04-2008
by Bryan Collins
Nearly 1.3 billion mobile users are expected to use local mobile search services by 2013, according to a report from industry analysts Juniper Research.
The amount of people using local mobile search services will comprise 30 percent of the word's mobile subscriber base, according to the report, which said that local search will account for 43 percent of mobile search advertising between now and 2013. The total value of mobile phone search revenues will reach USD4.8 billion.
"The iPhone for all its faults has produced some quite remarkable services. It is getting 50 times the amount of searches than the other leading handsets. Apple couldn't believe the scale of the searches, neither could Yahoo. Clearly, going down the line a good proportion of those searches will not be for content, they will be for local searches, they will be location-based searches. That will increase searches as a whole," said Windsor Holden, principal analyst with Juniper, speaking with ENN.
According to the report, the best equipped regions for the delivery of mobile local searches are Western Europe and North America. The countries within these areas already have good local digital information suppliers such as the yellow pages, city guides, traffic information and so on. They also have good mapping data for all kinds of roads which feature plenty of points of interest -- something relevant to local mobile searches.
"Clearly it is going to be popular both in Western markets and developing markets given that they don't have any kind of fixed broadband base to speak of in a lot of those markets. Mobile internet is effectively going to be the de facto way of accessing the internet in those areas," explained Holden.
The user response rate to local advertising is expected to be high. However, Juniper's report cautions that the effectiveness of advertising in mobile searches will vary widely according to local conditions, and that an "advertising overload" could put users off using mobile search services altogether.
"The danger with advertising is that people have had their hands burnt by spam in the past, on the consumer front and to a certain extent on the operator front. The important thing with advertising is to make it not as intrusive and to make people want to click on those links rather than push that advertising at them," Holden told ENN.
According to the report, users who had had negative mobile search experience in the past will be put off using such a search service as will those who are unhappy with the privacy policies of providers. The limitations of certain handsets will also have to be overcome, and the mobile search services will have to be optimised for each region. However, it will be in the provider and advertisers' interest to overcome these obstacles.
"If you look at the kind of response rate you are getting on fixed-internet and that has generated significant revenues. The beauty of the mobile is that people have the handset with them all the time. From a local search perspective that is almost a gold-mine," said Holden.
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