Ground Truth uses carrier data to change mobile metrics game

A new mobile data measurement company popped up in the industry today, claiming to have the most accurate metrics of consumer behavior on the wireless Web.

Ground Truth’s trick isn’t a better consumer survey or a fancier handset tracking application. Rather it’s taking its data directly from carrier databases, compiling a massive sample of real-world browsing statistics, from which it can extrapolate some of the most detailed reports in the industry.

Based in Seattle and backed with $2.6 million in financing from Steamboat Ventures and Voyager Capital, Ground Truth has managed to get operators to cough up their most closely guarded secrets, their subscriber data, in order to create a sample of 2.5 million users from which Ground Truth generates its intelligence. While much larger and firmly established firms such as ComScore and Nielsen (who acquired M:Metrics and Telephia respectively) use small-scale sampling techniques ranging from consumer surveys, handset tracking applications and analysis of customer bills, Ground Truth is able to get real use data from nearly one-tenth of the US population, said Luni Libes, founder and chief technology officer of Ground Truth. And it’s able to get that data in near real time, chronicling mobile usage on a weekly basis rather than quarter by quarter, he added.

“Operators have been collecting this data for more than a decade,” Libes said. “Some of them have been using this data internally for some time. Some of them barely knew what they had.”

But what operators weren’t doing was sharing it, due to competitive and privacy concerns. That was the primary obstacle Ground Truth had to overcome to set up its platform, said Sterling Wilson, Ground Truth’s CEO. Ground Truth not only had to provide assurances that carrier’s individual data wouldn’t fall into the competition’s hands, but that the data be masked enough that no one could extrapolate anything about an individual operator from the reports.

“We have agreements with a broad scope of operators, but we won’t say which ones,” Wilson said. “In fact, we won’t report on anything that could be identifiable to any individual network.”

So Ground Truth will provide detailed information on what Websites customers are going to, but it won’t say from which browsers or which handsets. Exclusivity deals that operators have with device vendors—such as AT&T’s (NYSE:T) partnership with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)—would be a dead giveaway, Wilson said.

Ground Truth will, however, track every manner of data external to the operators, from page views, unique visitors, sessions, session lengths and advertising click-throughs. In its inaugural report, Ground Truth has already found some interesting patterns in the mobile Web.

For instance, in its rankings of web sites visited with the mobile browser, consumers weren’t just going to established Web brands. Rather six of the top 10 were mobile-specific sites such as Mocospace, AirG, CrushOrFlush, Myxer and Cellufun, dispelling the notion that the mobile Web will merely become a scaled down version of the wired Web.

Ground Truth also found that half of mobile Web traffic is dominated by social networking sites. MySpace was the number one mobile destination, maintaining wireless momentum it has lost to Facebook in the PC browser. Facebook was still strong, however, coming in second place in Ground Truth’s rankings, while Google was the third-biggest destination and mobile social networking site Mocospace came in fourth. And while many industry experts predicted that adult content would be one of the biggest drivers in mobile content, Ground Truth found that X-rated sites accounted for less than 1% of total traffic on the mobile Web.