Excerpts of the article (newspaper techniques, February 2004).

"... Mobile services opens up a world of opportunities for the media industry. Newspapers sit on strong brand names, loads of content and big customer bases and are perfectly poised to become major content providers in this new infrastructure. Not everything is rosy, however, as much of the power lies beyond the grasp of single providers, in the hands of the big mobile operators. Nevertheless, there are opportunities. Start with basics; learn the SMS walk before moving on to the MMS shuffle. And forget the 3G tango, at least for now...

If newspapers found the internet a challenge when it arrived, the business opportunities within the mobile services sector are considerably harder to get your head around. At the same time there is more scope for generating revenue, instantly. There are, however, a number of issues to consider before venturing into this field, and this article aims to shine some light on the main ones...

... The first MMS networks in Europe were launched in March 2002. By the end of June 2003 there were 15 million registered subscribers globally. The number of MMS users in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) went from more than 1 million MMS users at the end of 2002 to close to 3 million MMS users by end of March 2003. In October last year there were 167 operators offering commercial MMS services, and more than 60 percent of these were in Europe...

... According to Jeroen Jansen, content project manager for i-mode at KPN Mobile, the content providers that i-mode partners with are crucial to the service: "Our content partners are essential for i-mode. They have the knowledge about their content, we are just a transportation company and try to help them exploit their content in the best (mobile) way." KPN Mobile's content partners in the Netherlands include De Telegraaf, de Volkskrant, ANP (Dutch Press Agency), Reuters, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal and CNN...

...The main issue for content providers is how to generate revenue from the mobile services that they run.

Many newspapers run Premium SMS services, i.e. the user pays for the message he or she sends to a five-digit short number common to all users and operators in the market. The content provider, i.e. the newspaper, sets the price for sending such a message, but the operators decide the maximum charge allowed. This charging limit varies greatly; in Sweden it is about 3 euros, in Finland it is 20 euros. Content providers benefit from a higher maximum price; they can then offer a much broader variety of services, because they can charge more...

... As we have seen, for newspapers the opportunities in the mobile service world are as numerous as the problems. In a complex value chain it is important for content providers to form the right partnerships and build from there. Peter M. Norman at WIN gives newspapers the advice to start with the basics, i.e. SMS:

"SMS is universal with an ever-growing demographic profile that reaches all age groups. MMS penetration in the U.K. is now reaching 15 percent, which suggests that this is an area where offerings are becoming relevant to newspaper chains. Moreover, there are opportunities for network endorsement of offerings as this is an area they are actively looking to promote at this time. 3G is not worth considering yet as too small a base of the readers will have 3G capabilities."

One thing is clear, mobile communication is an area that no paper should ignore, it's a market that is growing quickly and anyone with content, a brand and a customer base should be able to capitalise on it. Read on to find out what the Swedish Newspaper Association has done to help promote the cause of the content providers to the operators.

The whole article on the Ifra website.