Mobile Content Search – Can Niche Players Play A Role ?

Paid mobile search, advertising in which advertisers only pay when a visitor clicks on their ad or link from a search engine page, is rapidly gaining momentum. A small US startup company called MCN, headquartered in the west of Tokyo, between Shibuya and Ebisu along the Yamanote circular line, is one of the drivers behind paid mobile search. MCN started in 2004 in Mountain View, CA.

Last year, the business headquarters was relocated to Tokyo to be closer to the fast growing Asian markets. The research and product development team is still in Mountain View. The company already employs 50 people.

The challenge for mobile search is the quality of the search results. It often takes more than five clicks to reach the relevant content. Mobile users do not have the patience for this. Long click distances kill content discovery. MCN is changing this with allwords - its vertical paid search program. If the provider’s database contains content relevant to the query, it can be presented to the mobile users in a few clicks. 'We call this 'Search Merchandising' and we are driving the industry’s highest clickthrough and conversion rates for mobile content transactions. On music search, for example, our clickthroughs are approaching 50% and growing and our content
partners tell us our conversion rates are easily double those of competing systems' says Marc Brookman, CEO of MCN. Content providers are charged on a pay-per-click basis, similar to
Google’s Adwords, except that with allwords they don’t have to manage the complexity of bidding for keywords—they can buy all of the keywords in a given category (Music, Images, Games, Comics, Video, etc)..

In Japan, MCN has signed up with more than 30 content providers and 6 distribution partners and portals. Yahoo! Mobile Japan uses allwords. On the Yahoo! Mobile Japan top page, users can
click on vertical content channel links to browse to the music or comics or games pages where the content search is powered by MCN. After entering the key word, MCN connects the query in
real-time directly to multiple content provider databases, ranks the most relevant results into a ‘Top 5’ and returns actual content items, not just links, to the user to purchase the content.

MCN co-exists with the traditional search providers. Google and Yahoo are targeting big traffic customers with mobile search. Google provides its search engine to DoCoMo and KDDI. Their
search results are often not relevant for paid mobile content discovery, the niche market MCN has been growing in with its white label service. How long will it take before Google and
Yahoo adapt their search and business model for the mobile Internet?

Stay tuned.