The mobile industry is still trying to figure out how to shrink the gap between the cost of operating mobile data networks and the related revenues from customers. Right now, operating costs are winning, big time.

But smarter mobile operators can see the light – in the form of sharing advertising revenues with content providers.

A Neuralitic customer performed a study using SevenFlow, to help them better understand the exposure of their subscriber base to different sources of advertising (based on dongle traffic). And the results, at least in terms of the relation between browsing and ads served, were surprising. When comparing ads served with browsing habits, we notice two clusters of mobile subscribers with an atypical number of ads served to them.

  • The first cluster was listed in the high data consumption browsing category – up to 5x above average – but was served a low percentage of ads.
  • The second cluster fell within the low data consumption browsing category – 4x below average – and was served a high percentage of ads.

From this, we may infer that those in the high browsing/low ads served category are more likely peer-to-peer users, who though they browse and consume a lot of data, it looks like very few ads end up in front of them.

With subscribers in the low browsing/high ads served group, we noticed that these visitors mostly visited portals (Yahoo! Email and several content sites like travel and news).

This all may add up to the fact that ad publishers are very savvy, and know who they want in front of their ads.

So the question asked is: should mobile operators extend this model from exposure to click, and assign value to each byte of advertising flowing into the operator’s network? Simply put, should operators play a role in delivering targeted ads? This could allow operators to measure the potential business case of exploiting revenue sharing with content providers.

What do you think? Do you think that this is the work of efficient advertising publishers or it is simply as case of attracting visitors with basic browsing patterns? Share your thoughts below in our comments section.