Online number-crunching firm ComScore announced Wednesday that it has acquired M:Metrics, a mobile usage statistics company, for $44.3 million in cash and a handful of common stock options.
The reason for the purchase is pretty obvious: as mobile phones make up a bigger and bigger chunk of digital consumption, ComScore wants to be able to provide the relevant statistics to businesses and advertisers. M:Metrics operates mobile phone usage survey MobiLens, mobile ad statistic tabulator M:Ad, and mobile Web monitoring product MeterDirect. ComScore currently has about 950 clients, the company said, and M:Metrics has more than 180.
"With the substantial growth of 3G devices and Internet friendly handsets, we believe we are now at an inflection point in Internet usage on mobile devices," ComScore CEO Magid Abraham said in a statement. "Our acquisition of M:Metrics makes ComScore an immediate market leader in this space and positions ComScore to deliver significant shareholder value."
Gaining access to additional measurement technology could also help ComScore deal with the fact that many businesses still don't trust Web usage metrics, which often vary significantly from one tracking firm to the next. The Interactive Advertising Bureau requested last year that ComScore, along with competitor Nielsen/NetRatings, go through an audit to scrutinize its measurement methodologies.
As part of the acquisition, which closed Wednesday, M:Metrics co-founders Will Hodgman and Seamus McAteer will become part of ComScore's management team.
Helio's Buddy Beacon was hyped, but it's the social networking mainstays that are actually getting used by mobile customers.
(Credit: Flytip.com)New research from the mobile-focused statistics firm M:Metrics has focused on exactly how many mobile-phone customers are using their handsets to access social networks and blogs, and the results aren't particularly surprising: not a whole lot of people are.
In the month of June, a total of only 12.3 million mobile consumers in the United States and Western Europe (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom) accessed a social-networking site or blog on their phones at least once. In the U.K., this came out to a total of only 2.5 percent of mobile users; 2.8 percent in Italy; 2.3 percent in Spain; 1.9 percent in Germany; and only 1.5 percent in France.
Interestingly enough, the highest percentage (3.5 percent) was in the U.S., which is typically thought to lag behind European and Asian countries in mobile-media consumption.
Mobile social networking is something that you hear a lot about, and not just because Facebook has just launched an iPhone-optimized site. As the M:Metrics results show, Web and mobile-media companies can see plenty of potential for growth simply because there isn't a whole lot of social networking going on in the mobile space yet.
Sometimes, the potential for growth has led companies to attempt to develop strictly mobile social-networking features--often carrier-specific, such as those of Helio's GPS-based "Buddy Beacon" service. But not surprisingly, it's the mobile-optimized versions of existing popular social-networking sites that have proven to be the early leaders.
In the U.S. and U.K., MySpace.com's mobile site is the most popular (despite only being available on several carriers) with 3.7 million users in the U.S. and 440,000 in the U.K.; Facebook comes in second place with 2 million users in the U.S. and 307,000 in the U.K.
Third place in the U.S. was YouTube, with 901,000 mobile users; third place in the U.K. was Bebo, with 288,000. (Recently, another firm's statistics showed that Bebo may be passing longtime leader MySpace in the U.K. when it comes to unique visitors.)
In the four other European countries, MSN Live Spaces was the most popular mobile social network. Also of note is the fact that in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, the 13-to-17 age demographic was the one doing the most mobile social networking; in the U.S. and U.K., it was the slightly older 18-to-24 demographic.
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