A new measure of mobile success

Wireless service providers' visibility into the universe of mobile multimedia usage is about to become a lot more clear, if two veterans of the practice of measuring online and wireless usage are successful in their new effort.

This month, Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer, who possess complementary expertise in the areas of wireless and multimedia measurement, launched the mobile consultancy M:Metrics with the intention of offering a far more granular view of mobile content consumption than has been available previously.

“This is a market waiting to be measured,” said Hodgman, co-founder, president and CEO of M:Metrics. Hodgman knows from measurement of consumer phenomena: He founded AdRelevance, which helped set the standard for online advertising benchmarks, was purchased by Jupiter Media Metrix and became Nielsen//Net Ratings. Before forming M:Metrics, he was CEO of Sightward.

McAteer, co-founder, chief product architect and senior analyst at M:Metrics, was a senior analyst for SRI International and a research fellow at Jupiter. In 2001, he founded the mobile consultancy Zelos Group, and he views the formation of M:Metrics as a logical extension of the research he did at Zelos.

“Wireless companies are looking for very granular data for their markets and benchmark data for competitors in their sector,” McAteer said. “Quantification was really necessary.”

What M:Metrics intends to quantify runs the wireless gamut: handset capabilities and subscriber adoption rates for various handset models, applications provided by carriers, consumption of that content by mobile subscribers and so on. The target for that data is also broad: wireless service provider marketers, content producers, product managers — anyone whose job function could improve by more verifiable information.

“You need factual data to support assumptions,” McAteer said. “Assumptions heretofore were based on conversations between applications developers and service providers. We provide a snapshot and a running tally of what's really going on and what's currently in the market. You can use that to gauge the diffusion of innovation.”

That data is collected and verified using a methodology developed by M:Metrics that consists of a voluntary panel of 180,000 wireless subscribers. M:Metrics tracks their consumption of mobile multimedia applications based on subscriber recall and also monitors performance of all U.S. wireless service providers.

“It's comparable, in some respects, to TV and radio measurement, which rely on a recall-based methodology,” McAteer said.

M:Metrics plans to eventually embed technology into smartphones that would allow usage metering.

“You have to understand people's ownership of a device, the content delivered to a device and the people in the middle,” Hodgman said. “Unlike any other medium, mobile is horribly complicated — every phone has unique capabilities.”

The initial data M:Metrics has gathered, including numbers on text messaging use (see figure), already has validated the effort, McAteer said.

“The magnitude of the opportunity is supported by the data we're seeing,” McAteer said. “Things that were heretofore a hunch can now be backed up by real evidence.”