Mobile phone users worldwide are expected to spend more than $3 billion this year on ring tones . . . and I cannot help but giggle when I type those words. Ring tones, $3 billion, kid you not.
Mobile phone users worldwide are expected to spend more than $3 billion this year on ring tones . . . and I cannot help but giggle when I type those words.
Ring tones, $3 billion, kid you not.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if Jay Emmet, president of mBlox-Americas, also lets out a giggle now and then when he reads such predictions. The difference is that his would be giddiness born not of astonishment but the unbridled joy that comes with knowing your company is among those hearing ka-ching whenever phones burst into song.
MBlox doesn’t actually sell ring tones – more than 100 companies in North America and Europe do – but it helps make the music happen, among other things.
“Mblox is an aggregator in the [Short Message Service] space,” Emmet says. “If you’re a ring-tone company or a ring-tone provider and you want to sell ring tones to the public, you can do it, but you’ll have a problem connecting to all the networks. You have two choices: You can pursue individual contracts and connections dealing with the AT&Ts, T-Mobiles, etc. by yourself, or you can come to a single aggregator that has already established those commercial and technical relationships. You basically send all your traffic through the front door; you don’t have to maintain the high fixed costs of the connectivity.”
Ring tones typically cost a buck or two per pop. And while not as well established here as in Europe, those buck or twos will add up to more than $300 million in U.S. sales this year, a twofold increase over 2004.
“What’s particularly interesting to me is that people are paying more for ring tones than they will to buy the song itself to download to an iPod,” Emmet says.
Interesting is one word for it, although not my first choice.
Ring tones are not the only product fueling rapid growth in so-called premium SMS. News, various alerts, games, interactive TV and micropayments for products as mundane as a can of soda are but a handful of the other drivers. Marketing and entertainment companies are gorging themselves on schemes designed to exploit SMS.
“I don’t want to make it seem as though SMSing is the next great, huge thing that’s going to displace everything else – it’s not,” Emmet says. “The carriers see it as a high-margin, high-growth segment of their business. The people with content and products see it as a way to move them to the mobile phone. And I basically act in the middle as an aggregator both in terms of traffic flow and the billing payout.”
Despite the gaudy numbers, momentum behind SMS is only beginning to gain steam. Emmet likes to point to surveys that show 80% of American mobile phone users have yet to send their first SMS message.
I thought I heard a giggle when he told me.
But hold the phone . . .
It seems as though Italian researchers are trying to rain on the SMS parade. According to a study from an Italian children’s rights organization, about a third of that country’s youngsters are “cell phone addicts.” One 13-year-old girl was said to have received treatment from an orthopedist – anti-inflammatories, ordered rest – after typing 100 or more SMS missives per day.
Irritability and mood swings also were attributed to excessive cell phone use, the researchers found, although how they identified a control group of teens who do not exhibit such traits is beyond me.
Moreover, it seems that these researchers might have missed a bright side of overdosing on SMS: All that furious typing is most likely the most exercise many of these teenagers get.
Go ahead and risk the injury: My address is buzz@nww.com.
