Moko - Mobile Community with 100 Million Page Views Per Month

Moko is a mobile web application that allows users to create profiles, meet new people, chat and share multimedia content. Loop Mobile, the company behind Moko, is based in Sydney, Australia and was listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) in June, 2007. I talked to Ian Rodwell, the founder and head of products & technology at Loop Mobile, to learn more about Moko, its pricing strategy, mobile social network usage patterns, the company’s value proposition to telcos, and its global expansion strategy.

Moko: a mobile social network that centers around chatroms
To use Moko you start by creating a profile about yourself, similar to what you would do on MySpace. You describe yourself, upload a photo, and create your friends list. Typically, communication between users is initiated when someone for example uploads a picture. The conversation might start with people commenting on the picture, and might turn to a completely different topic like talking about their normal day or anything else they might be interested in. Most of the pictures and videos are taken through the phone’s camera and uploaded by sending an MMS to a carrier shortcode, or to ‘content@moko.mobi’.

Sometimes two more users might want to take the conversation privately and this can happen through a premium feature called private rooms.

All interactions on Moko happen via the hanset and you can add, edit, and delete content from your personal galleries and profiles, right from your cell phone.

Moko is a mobile only product. But the company thinks that some features may be better suited to be carried out on on the desktop. So Ian and his team are releasing a web interface to compliment a new release called “MOKO Music” that will extend to all user user profile management. This is due for release at the end of September. By the end of the week, Loop is releasing a website to promote MOKO - Moko.mobi. MokoMusic, is a segmented section of Moko targeted for musicians, bands, and deejays. It allows them to upload their mp3 files and full length video clips from the web - something that is impossible, or very expensive to do from the mobile.

Moko is also going to release a version of their product that is enhanced and optimised for use on the iPhone.

Pricing
Any person with a phone that can access the internet can join Moko. That user will however have to pay the applicable data fees to their mobile company. Depending where the user accesses MOKO, will determine the data costs. Data is the UK is becoming very cheap, so this will not be a significant barrier to entry.

Mobile users in Australia currently can access MOKO via the 3 Mobile network, and the company plans to add Virgin, Optus, and Telstra before the end of the year.

In the UK ThreeMobile users can join Moko for the fixed price of 1.5 British Pounds per month. This allows them to chat and view pictures and videos all they want for no extra charge. MMS picture and video uploads cost extra.

Once they are part of the community, Moko users (or Mokies) can pay for premium services like private messaging or private chatrooms.

Moko shares the subscription fee as well as any subsequent premium fees with the operator or the billing aggregator.

Usage Behaviour
When you talk about mobile social networking most pepople tend to think of teenagers. But according to Ian Rodwell, Moko’s users are more diverse:

Surprisingly it’s a lot older audience than you would expect. A big proportion of the users are young adults / late teens. We don’t see very many young teens in there. And about 30% of the user base at the moment is over 30. So it’s a very wide demographic.

Ian also gave me an insightful description of 5 common user profiles:

• People with a limited social circle: Single mothers for example who might not be as socially active in the physical world. They use Moko as a way to connect to other users and form peer groups.
• People on the road: Frequent travellers who use Moko to pass the time when they’re commuting.
• People engaging in multiple activities: Fans of a tv show that are sitting on the couch watching an episode and using Moko to discuss about the show with ther fans.
• People who want intimacy: Youth living in shared housing or still living at home. They might retreat to their bedrooms and use Moko to talk to other people in a private setting. Many of those users have a PC which is shared with other residents (i.e. the rest of the family).
• People who want to save money: They might use moko because it allows them to send and receive messages with their friends without paying for SMS.

Value Proposition to Mobile Operators
Moko offers operators is an increased ARPU. MMS has yet to take off on a large scale. And the mobile internet’s lack of a ‘browse & upload’ feature means that the only way a user can upload content to any mobile service including Moko is to send an MMS to a specific email or number. The fact that Moko users have so far uploaded 2,268,067 pictures and videos is a clear indication that the company can help mobile telcos better utilize MMS and increase their average return per user.

Moko is also interesting to operators because it can potentially let them in on part of its advertising revenues. Operators are starting to realize the opportunity in mobile advertising. The average time spent is impressive and stands at 73 minutes per session per user and is far higher than comparable social networks profiled in a 2006 Hitwise study on social network user engagement. And that makes Moko potentially very profitable. The graph to the right (click to expand) shows average session times for Moko as compared to other social networks profiled in the Hitwise study.

Of course, Moko is in no way obliged to share advertising revenues. But doing so allows it to be featured prominently on the operator’s mobile portal. This exposes the moko brand, drives traffic, and results in higher membership rates. In addition, telcos with which Moko has an agreement can manage the billing for them. This results in a ‘cleaner’ customer experience, freeing the company from any administrative overhead to manage payments, and the possibility to negotiate better revenue shares as compared to a mobile payments aggregator.

Expanding Beyond Australia
You might think that partnering with a mobile operator in your country will open the doors wide open to partner with its sister companes in other countries. But Ian thinks that you might as well treat them as completely different networks. For example even though all ThreeMobile operators belong to the Hutchinson group, they each operate as separate entities and you have to enter into separate agreements. And it takes a long time to go through each operator and negotiate those deals. In addition, sister companies can also be quite different technically. The Three integration that Loop Mobile did with Three Australia was considerably different than the one they did with Three UK.

Loop Mobile’s expansion strategy is to go for other English-speaking countries like the US, Scandinavia, Singapore, etc. They have an office in London and are setting up shop in the US and have people there negotiating contracts with the carriers right now.

Another component of the company’s expansion is to partner with media companies like iTV in the UK to provide white label versions of Moko for their own mobile communities.

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