As mobile publishing continues to gather steam in the media community, ABC announced this week that it has partnered with mobile publishing platform provider Verve Wireless to deliver readership data for publishers using the platform.
The partnership between the two companies is a data-services agreement, and the price will be incorporated into ABC’s auditing services of its Verve-using member publications, Neal Lulofs, senior VP, communications and strategic planning, ABC, explains. California-based Verve says its proprietary mobile publishing platform is used by 600 mediacos in Canada, the US and Europe, including Canadian Press and Associated Press.
The new service will provide information on audience by device type, day and day part, audience access points (mobile web, app or e-reader), unique visitors and page views. The goal of the partnership was to provide ABC members with a single source of cross-platform auditing information, Lulofs tells MiC.
And moving forward, the organization hopes to expand its mobile auditing services to a wider member audience. ‘We’re thinking of…coming out with a stand-alone audit report that would get into more detail on the mobile side, so it would provide an opportunity to integrate mobile data with other media platforms and provide an opportunity go deeper into mobile activity [across devices].
‘Especially where this market is going,’ he adds. ‘It’s not just about mobile access via cellphones; it’s iPhones, iPads and apps. That’s the kind of data that advertisers are really interested in.’
In the release on the announcement, Verve Wireless stated that it has seen a 243% increase in the number of readers accessing news from mobile devices via its platforms from March 2009 to this year.
While much attention has been paid to smartphone and mobile device usage this year with the debut of the iPad and all of its shiny new content, a recent report from Toronto-based Delvinia found that smartphone penetration is still quite low in Canada. Even among those that do have the devices, the majority still mainly uses them for calls and not for web browsing, apps or GPS.
