data

Orange launches mobile social networking portal

Territories covered

Western Europe

France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, UK,

Author/s

Ronan de Renesse

Published: 14-Jul-08

France Telecom's Orange has launched a mobile social networking portal enabling access to several features of some of the most popular social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook and Bebo among others. Users are able to view and update a trimmed down version of their profiles (i.e. emails, comments and pictures only). The mobile social networking portal is currently a subsection of the Orange World portal but the company said that it plans to embed it in the home screen of its Orange Signature phones. The service will be accessible to Orange's customers in France, UK, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal although partnerships are different for each market as the popularity of social networks greatly varies by country. Orange mobile social networking portal includes the following partnerships:

Switzerland, Portugal: MySpace and Pikeo
France: MySpace, Pikeo, Skyrock, DailyMotion and Meetic
UK: MySpace, Pikeo, Facebook, Bebo, Flirtomatic
Spain: MySpace, Pikeo, Meetic

Our take...
There are several reasons which justify Orange's move:

Push the adoption of flat-rate data packages
Increase mobile internet awareness
Acquire new subscribers
Strengthen its mobile internet gatekeeper role
Create some mobile advertising opportunities

Monetising social networks has proven to be difficult for online for service providers as ad revenues per page view are generally very low. However, the mobile space opens new ways of monetising those services with location-based applications and targeted advertising. Screen Digest does not expect these monetisation methods for mobile social networking to emerge before end 2009. Regarding content, users generally don't get upsold to paying for content while using social networks. On the other hand, mobile social networks that evolve around a specific theme (e.g. music fan base) could be used as distribution platforms.