Troy Norcross posts about Yell.com declaring 2007 the year for mobile web. I agree with Troy’s comments and thought it pertinent to underscore one of the comments from Yell.com:
cost is still the overriding barrier to wider mobile web adoption
As Troy goes on to say:
Until operators make flat rate data pricing plans available there will be limited adoption
In FierceWifi recently, they quote Parks Associates for reporting that at a $35 price point for all-you-can-eat mobile broadband, the total worldwide addressable market is 100 million subscribers.
I believe that this is key to unlocking the pent-up value in this ecosystem. There are a lot of great ideas out there that just can’t create compelling businesses when your trying to monetize 100 million subscribers (and likely a subset of those fit your demographic).
I am glad to see more operators offering all-you-can-eat data plans, or some approximation thereof, but unfortunately — 2007 is not the year of the mobile web. The total addressable market is not nearly what it needs to be.
Mobile operators have this love-hate relationship with the big brands like Yahoo and Google. At the root of this is the age-old question of who owns the customer (is it the MNO’s customer, or Google’s customer) that traces back to early WAP disintermediation fears.
The irony is that by making it difficult for start-ups to create sustainable mobile businesses, the operators are creating a defensible position for the big brands, who don’t need to make money in mobile today! Talking with operators at 3GSM, I got the sense that things are getting worse and not better for your average start-up. Not only is the trend away from operators paying for unproven mobile data services, risk is increasingly being pushed to the start-up.
