Mocospace - mjelly Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week

Hi it’s James from mjelly.com, welcome to another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week” here at Mobile Industry Review.  So far we’ve looked at three different mobile 2.0 sites or applications Taptu, Peperonity.com and Mig33 – this week its the turn of the mobile social network Mocospace.

What is it?

Mocospace is a mobile social network with all the usual features – profile pages, forums, chat, buddylists, photosharing, blogging and so on – everything runs off a mobile-optimized website and they also have a basic PC front-end.   Like the name, Mocospace is quite similar to myspace in a lot of ways, including the fact that they have a lot of features around music, for example, users can download new tracks which are now being released on the site.  The seminal hip-hop label Def Jam has a partnership agreement with Mocospace for its artists including LL Cool J, Nas and Ne Yo.  The site has built up a really nice community – users refer to it as “moco” and I’m constantly hearing about how “friendly” a place it is.

Why is it interesting?

The site was founded in the USA in 2005, before mobile was “trendy” in Silicon Valley and over the last three years they have managed to build something really exciting.  Mocospace is another mobile 2.0 startup that has been able to raise a lot of funding ($7m in total), and it has a heavy weight team including Jim Scheinman who was one of the core people behind the social network Bebo’s success.  What really sets Mocospace apart is that is really has managed to gain a lot of usage and is also making real money.

The numbers are pretty impressive – Mocospace just passed 4m members and is getting 2 bn page views a month with 70% of its traffic coming from the mobile web.  According to Hitwise, Mocospace is the most popular mobile entertainment site in the US and its also the third highest used site by Opera Mini browser users in the United States.  Mocospace is also reporting that it is making “millions” in annual revenues from mobile advertising.

Mocospace has done all this at the same time as the big online social networks (myspace, facebook et al) have rolled out their own mobile sites so there’s pretty clear evidence that mobile-focused services can beat the PC websites at their own game on mobile. The question is, if it can work for social networks what other categories of online services could have their own mobile-focused success stories?

See you next week 🙂

You can find mocospace on mjelly, which is a directory of the best mobile sites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)