(Full disclosure: My company AlienPants is a provider of mobile content and mobile content delivery solutions.)The guys over at The Register have posted a story talking about the recent problems mBlox had with The crazy frog and how they've turned to mobile porn as the solution to maintaining revenues.

The contention of the article is that mobile porn is 'sticky' (no pun intended), and customers are more likely to come back and purchase more content without having to be tricked into dodgy subscriptions.

Of course, this is true only if you scratch the surface of mobile content. We know (commercially, in terms of sales and income) that non-porn mobile content can be just as 'sticky' and popular as porn content, as long as the content is relevant and interesting, and the sale of the content is treated seriously, not as something to be marketed in what is effectively a shotgun manner - bombard people with ads, hope to get a small percentage to sign up.

(Which sounds a lot like the marketing model adopted by spammers - get your message out to as many people as possible and hope to get a couple of percent actually responding...)

My contention here is that it is the content being marketed as mainstream mobile content that is the reason why the mobile content isn't as 'sticky' as it could be. Our own mobile content service, which is entirely non-subscription, non-intrusive, totally open and not actually 'mobile' content, can claim the following statistics, all of which we think indicate a 'stickyness':

• More than 75% of consumers who view the service go on to make a purchase.^*


• 50% of people who make one purchase go on to make another. And a high percentage of those remain as long term repeat customers.^*


• Some customers have been using the service on a regular basis for more than 18 months.^*


• The service continues to gain new customers more than 12 months after advertising ceased, mostly through word of mouth referrals.^*

Another good example comes from a couple of years ago with text to screen services. Statistics of incoming SMS messages showed that a porn text-to-screen service generated only 10% to 15% more traffic than our own text to screen program, which was entirely non-porn related.

So we know from experience that whilst porn can provide 'sticky' content, it's not the only type of content that can be 'sticky'. As long as the content provided has some intrinsic value to the consumer, then the consumer will continue to purchase it. Ringtones and Wallpapers are by their nature transient, and have may have no ongoing value to the purchaser beyond the initial purchase. Such purchases are also likely to be impulse purchases, unless the purchase is a deliberate one to obtain a specific piece of mobile content -in which case the customer is unlikely to be a repeat customer and unlikely to be interested in a subscription service.

However it is also the mass marketing of this type of mobile content that is shrinking the potential for more relevant, interesting or intrinsically valuable mobile content being made available in the market place, as the customer perception of mobile content is being coloured by the mass marketing of transient content, often through dodgy (or slightly dodgy) subscription services and intrusive advertisements.

^*: All figures are based on individual unique sales figures or server logs.