It’s A Free Mobile Concert Now: Avoid the Brown Marketing Acid

Once complex and fraught with labyrinthine business relationships across countless vendors, the mobile development world is starting to open up considerably for publishers who want to get their beak wet with the emerging platform. Companies like MuseStorm, Yahoo, and now Apple are making it easier for just about any-sized publisher to develop mobile sites, widgets and applications and see how they fly on multiple devices. All you need to add is the promotion.

Apple announced that it served over 100 million apps in less than two months. Forget the fact that many of us ignore most of the iPhone apps we did download greedily, or that many of these apps are one-trick ponies that are fun to try once or twice before deleting. The sheer volume of downloads on a platform with such a relatively small installed base tells us something about user curiosity about mobile. Of course, we would prefer that Apple gave us some stats on user retention, active use, deletion rates, etc. As if that is going to happen!

One new player in the self-serve, build-your-own mobile strategy game is Thumbplay. This veteran of the ringtone, wallpaper, games market in mobile is launching an open beta of its Thumbplay Open platform, which lets any publisher up0load, manage and sell mobile assets to users. Site publishers can sell wallpapers, ringtones, applications or widgets from their site via the Thumbplay system, which handles the back end of fulfillment and billing. A publisher can feature the mobile content on their own site and give users direct access to the Thumbplay distribution system so the end user can download content. Thumbplay claims that mobile generate $5-$8 from each new subscriber typically.

With the new mobile openness comes the challenge: how do you market this stuff effectively and to what degree. One of the frustrating aspects of the market thus far has been finding effective ways to push mobile assets to users. How much of your staff’s attention and how much of your Web site’s space and effort should go into an admittedly incremental revenue stream? Until mobile demonstrates its ROI in revenue and audience development, it will remain in the backwater of most media brands.