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Compare and Contrast: Mowser and Mippin’s Variable Fortunes

Russ Beattie, head of Mowser, shut up shop on the venture this week, and placed the content re-aggreator into the mythical Deadpool.

But the traffic never showed up, and what did show up was of questionable quality at best. (Easily 80% of Mowser’s traffic has been related to porn). Maybe that means that the service sucked or it wasn’t sticky and/or viral enough – that may have been part of it, but having used the site myself, and seeing how some users did continually return to use it daily, I think in fact the general market demand just never was there. In fact, if you look at the number of page views of even the most popular mobile-only websites out there, they don’t compare to the traffic of popular blogs, let alone major portals or social networks. Let me say that again clearly, the mobile traffic just isn’t there. It’s not there now, and it won’t be.
Russ Beattie

And today, into the feed reader, comes the success of Mippin (a site I’ve talked about a fair bit on All About Symbian). Mippin’s purpose in life…

Mippin optimises the latest content from websites into the perfect format for mobile phone screens. It provides users with instant and convenient access to the most up-to-date news, blogs and other business and lifestyle information. Mippin also brings direct benefit to online publishers and advertisers. It allows them to effortlessly distribute their web content and targeted branding messages to mobile audiences.
About Mippin.

…and they’ve just been named as a finalist in the Red Herring Top 100 Startups.

Discuss.

Sometimes it’s not the industry, but other circumstances which see the rise and fall of companies in markets – there are no easy answers as to why. But tucked in all of the blogs and discussions there does seem to be an answer.

80% of traffic to Mowser was looking for porn. It wouldn’t surprise me that a traffic breakdown to Mippin would have a similar spike in that particular field. People are looking for a solution, so perhaps the opportunity just needs to be grasped with two hands and seen through to a logical conclusion?

April 16, 2008; Multimedia, Web 2.0 (Observations);

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Comments

One Response to “Compare and Contrast: Mowser and Mippin’s Variable Fortunes”

  1. james on April 16th, 2008 14:19

    Yes we meed more mobile web success stories (apart from admob). Not sure if mippin has had any success yet though – what’s their traffic like, and how much is from developed markets where you can monetise?(UK, US, Europe).

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