Mobile: The facts don't support the hype

[PaulMa]

Moneyweb.co.za
24 August 2009


My spouse has gleefully taken to downloading e-books and reading them on his BlackBerry. Not only does it mean he can tuck into his favourite sci-fi author while stuck in the movie house with our four-year-old but he has declared it as comfortable as reading a traditional book.
This radical leap into the future happening right under my nose got me thinking about all the hype around optimising websites for cellphones, which in techie terms usually means applying a style sheet to your content so that it can be read easily on a teeny weeny phone.


Internet gurus who say this is the next big revolution are literally falling out of trees - especially as South Africa has so many cellphone users. According to AMPS research last year, the two biggest cellphone providers, Vodacom and MTN, had 20m subscribers between them.
In fact, there seems to be far more hype about the mobile revolution than there ever was about the internet and I'm told there is a veritable industry of mobile strategy consultants, urging all to get their websites cooking for mobile.
Almost all the big media players are investing considerable time and money in mobile strategies as they are betting on substantially increasing their audiences beyond South Africa's very limited pool of internet users - which is about 4.5m people.
But I wonder if they may be putting the cart in front of the horse. Sure, South Africa has a lot of cellphone users but how much do we know about their habits.
I, for instance, am a diehard BlackBerry fan (I think the term is Crackberry) because it allows me to use my e-mail, Twitter and Facebook on the run. It may not be an iPhone, the Rolls-Royce of internet-surfing phones, but it's high-end with a large-ish screen, computer keyboard and the web in mind.


If you believe the mobile consultants, I am exactly the multi-tasking new-media consumer who is surfing the net while balancing on my Pilates ball at the gym.
So am I? Hell no, and to be honest, it's going to take me a while to make that leap.
I noodle around on Facebook on my phone but to my mind it's still a communications device and I consume media on my laptop or over my morning coffee. I'm not too proud to admit that I've just got used to reading long pieces of text on a laptop screen and up until a few months ago, I was still printing out documents or interesting stories so that I could read them on paper.
Talking to SA's original internet guru, Arthur Goldstuck, who is also MD of World Wide Worx consultancy and research agency, I discovered that I'm not a Luddite though my gadget-fiend husband sometimes makes me feel like one.
I am one of millions of South African who are just not experienced enough with using cellphones to be actively surfing the web, downloading, uploading and whistling a happy tune - just as it takes about five years of surfing the net on a computer before you start really interacting and transacting.
We are creatures of habit, no matter how fast the world is changing.
Goldstuck's firm is in the middle of its annual Mobility survey looking into trends in South African cellphone usage and it indicates that there are between 2-4m people who actively surf the web on cellphones - and not the 10m bonanza bandied about.
The majority of people using cellphones to go on to the web are in fact downloading ringtones, wallpaper and use MXit, Twitter and Facebook but seldom move beyond this.
To my mind 2-4m people is hardly pay dirt and media companies which think their audiences will take off through mobile might do better in first spending money on researching cellphone habits.
Applying a mobile skin to your existing web content is unlikely to be compelling for the cellphone user and Goldstuck's research has a few pointers: people tend to scan breaking news headlines rather than read actual stories on their phones and live sports results are very popular.
I would venture that it's precisely the information you can't get at the big news portals that would fly: what's on guides, crime stats or traffic reports for your area, searchable job ads or classifieds, alerts for news stories in a specific research fields, sports or business sectors.
But the biggest weakness in most mobile strategies is that they seem to be missing, dare I say it, a strategy. Most media players aren't thinking further than growing audience, which will magically be supported by advertising.
Now, if that failed when newspapers went online, why in the world would it work with mobile?



Gill Moodie spent 14 years as a salaried hack in print media in South Africa and the UK before escaping to the blogosphere and freelance journalism. She is the publisher of Grubstreet http://grubstreet.co.za/