Walt Disney-owned ESPN is shutting down (reg req’d) it’s mobile phone service after pumping $150 million into the yearlong effort to deliver sports information to on the go sports aficionados. I had high hopes for the service, too bad it kicked the buck so quickly.
Speaking of mobile applications, last I heard, Match Mobile had 100,000 members, that number is a few years old. Perhaps someone at Match would be kind enough to share their current membership stats. Webdate and a few other sites are offering mobile features, but Webdate has completely fallen off the face of the earth according to Hitwise and Comscore. Have you seen the differences between the two firm’s reporting numbers recently? Hitwise definitely has the better stats, Comscore relies on a pretty small sample size here and in EU. Webdate just doesn’t have the money to advertise on Myspace, which is why schizophrenic True (safe dating with supermodels?) is running away with the traffic market at the moment.
True’s run up the charts will be most likely short-lived. They simply can’t keep up the momentum, especially as Myspace CPM starts to take off. True will most likely run out of ad spend money before they figure out how to monetize all those eyeballs, regardless of their new advertising system. Maybe they go so far as to drop the subscription price, from there on who knows what’s going to happen. Can advertising revenue keep the company afloat and pay for free background checks for users? It will be interesting to see where this all pans out in six months.
Back to mobile. I’ve always been lukewarm about mobile dating in the US. This isn’t Europe, and it certainly isn’t Korea or Japan, where everyone does everything via cell phone.
Part of the reason is that I have a Verizon Razor and I’m bitter. Coverage is great, but the phone blows for a number of reasons. I wouldn’t want to look at profiles on it if access was free, the phone is the problem and the carrier hates it’s customers so much it’s almost laughable.
I remember a study a few iDates ago where a dating site said that when they surveyed their members, mobile dating was something like 13th on the list of features and concerns they wanted addressed. Has this changed? Is anyone making more than a trickle of revenue off mobile dating? I didn’t think so.
Mobile dating on the third screen is pretty much stalled here in the US. What’s going to kick-start adoption? For one thing, move past rudimentary profile browsing and start coming up with cool things for flirters to do together. Location-based games, personality quizzes and sending phonecam pix back and forth are obvious options. Games where you have to earn the right to contact someone are going to be huge. Anonymous calling would be helpful, and so would access to reputation systems so you can check up on someone before meeting them at a nightspot.
I’ll pay for mobile dating applications, but only after I’m done with mobile social networking apps. Funny that Helio is basically tied their fortunes to Myspace, only to have the rug pulled out from under them with Myspace announcing a mobile app coming in the next quarter. Cool phones though.
Technorati Tags: helio, mobile+dating, myspace, true.com, webdate
