Posts by Thomas Husson from July 30, 2008

Thomas Husson | July 30, 2008, 12:07 PM
Declining prices for mobile banner ads

Not sure why but there were some articles today about the deal between Virgin Media and mobile advertising firm 4th Screen deal.
4th Screen was already selling ads for Virgin Mobile, but it may well be an extension of the deal with 4th Screen collaborating with Virgin's in-house advertising unit ids to plan and execute cross-platform efforts spanning mobile, television and the web.

With o2 as main client, 4th Screen had gained lots of traction in the last few months in the UK market. Yahoo! runs mobile ads for 3, T-Mobile and Vodafone. Not many news from ScreenTonic (MSFT) and a few off-portal deals for Nokia and others...

According to my colleague Nate Elliott, "Banner prices are today artificially inflated by the scarcity of mobile advertising inventory". As mentionned several times here, expect those prices to go down over time, as inventory rises. This already started to happen when O2 active inventory was made available.

Thomas Husson | July 30, 2008, 11:39 AM
EA/Gameloft mobile revenues

Both Gameloft and EA have just released their financial results for q2 2008.

Revenues of the two main players in the mobile game arena are on par: 25.3M euros for Gameloft vs $44M for EA.

Interestingly, North America now accounts for a significant 29% of Gameloft worldwide revenues. The company is delivering an impressive list of games for new mobile platforms (iPhone, N-Gage,...) but also for consoles (a new revenue stream).

On the contrary, EA Mobile revenues are growing but represented still a limited 5.5% of EAs total revenue. Year on year, revenues increased by a significant 44% between q2 2007 and q2 2008.

I like this business because it is not as hyped as mobile music or mobile TV, but delivering more revenues than these 2 content categories combined...

Here is some press coverage of the Developer 08 mobile gaming conference.

Thomas Husson | July 30, 2008, 06:16 AM
Golden Frequencies - another good signal for telecom players

During my holiday break, the report from my colleague Laurence Meyer has been published: Terrestrial TV and the Digital Dividend: Assessing the Role of High Definition in the DTT Market. See here.

Following my previous post, no political decision has been made yet in France.

According to an interesting article (as always from Jamal Henni) in Les Echos, this should be the case before September. The article mentions that the CSA (media regularory body) has finally decided to postpone the launch of 3 new HD channels in order not to preempt the digital dividend.

Another good signal for the telecom sector...