Myxer - mjelly mobile 2.0 service of the week
Greetings, James from mjelly.com here – its Friday and that means another “Mobile 2.0 Service of the Week” – our regular run-down of the most upfront mobile sites, apps and software. This week we’re going to be covering one of the biggest mobile media sharing communities out there – Myxer.com. Again, like a lot of stuff we cover, this is a mobile site which is really popular, but not many people in the mobile business have really heard of it.
What is it?
Myxer is a community for sharing ringtones and other content. Bands and individuals can upload music which myxer converts into the right formats for downloading to mobile – think youtube for ringtones and you’ve got the idea. The service is mainly driven by a PC website but it is also available over the mobile web at m.myxer.com.
Whilst there are quite a few similar sites Myxer has really taken things to the next level in terms of its technology platform. It’s created myxer tags and myxer codes to let users embed their content on social networks like myspace and on blogs and so on using HTML and flash-based widgets and badges. They have also managed to get SMS triggers working across all the major US networks to let you push content to your phone from the web. In fact, Myxer is now the fourth largest source of SMS in the US after American Idol, Google and American Greetings.
The company is based in Florida and they’ve raised a serious amount of money – $6.5 million in September 07, following an earlier $3m round.
Why is it interesting
Whilst there are lots of mobile content sharing communities out there, myxer is the one that has the largest usage and traffic. They have – 15m users, 1.7m content items on the site, 100,000 content providers and a massive 32 million mobile downloads a month. One million downloads a day is pretty impressive in a content area (ringtones) that a lot of people consider to be “dead”.
What myxer demonstrates is that there is still plenty of life left in the ringtones market – it is just the business model and user experience that is changing. Whereas the likes of Jamba developed a ringtone value chain based on subscriptions, promoted by heavy marketing investment, myxer is using a different approach based on user-generated content and viral distribution via widgets and social networks.
There may be other areas of the mobile market that could do with a similar change of approach, for example, java games have never managed to really hit the mainstream user and broadcast Mobile TV appears to be almost completely still-born. It may be that new startups like Myxer appear with a different way of engineering the value chain and start to take these services into new areas.
You can find myxer at mjelly which is a directory of mobile sites and other stuff at mjelly.com (PC) and m.mjelly.com (mobile)
