myNuMo, Opening Mobile to "The Long Tail of Content"

First off, what do we mean by "The Long Tail" ...

In most situations, 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the
products/services (depicted in red below). Thus, the remaining 80% of
the products have low demand and low sales. These constitute the
‘long tail’ (such as yoga enthusiasts). The principle of harnessing the
‘long tail’ argues that collectively, these low volume/low sales products
can make up market share that equals or exceeds the few bestsellers
– provided the distribution channel is large enough and the per unit
production cost is low.



In the case of mobile content; ringtones, wallpapers, mobile
video, text message services ... publishing content is difficult:

1. Technical issues such as format conversion and reliable content
delivery.
2. Business issues involving P-SMS agreements and expenses.

This is why you'll see mainly Hip-Hop/RAP ringtones advertised.
The cost of production is too high to support untapped markets.

For example, Julie is really into Yoga. She likes to listen to
chants and would love nothing more than to have a ringtone with this
sort of music. Now maybe someone who records this sort of music
would be interested in selling ringtones. The problem is that Jamba or
other ringtone publisher simply isn’t going to create a “YogaTones”
category. What’s more, even if a label had the resources to launch a
mobile store, or took advantage of some existing store, there’s just
no way they can efficiently get into the market. Sure, you could figure out
the formats and delivery via a user-typed in WAP page, and maybe bill
to a credit card ... But the FRICTION on both sides of the process
(publishing and purchasing) are just too high to make it worthwhile for
a label that owns Yoga Chant Recordings to get into the ringtone
business and provide customers with a "best pratices" content delivery
(credit card billing and typing in wap pages just won't cut it).

On an even smaller scale a school might want to raise money by
selling wallpapers of the school’s mascot and/or ringtones of the
school song. That may produce a few 100 sales of the item in question
(the average SeeMeTV video was sold to 25-30 people a month). It’s
just not worth the hassle for the ringtone publishing company (I
should know) to sell stuff like this. The friction of the publishing
process is just too high for the children at the school to deal with.

In comes myNuMo. Think of it as a eBay for digital content. For
creators, myNuMo deals with all the technical issues. Conversion to
handset formats is automatic. Even if you have no recording
experience, you can create a funny ringtone just by calling a phone
number. What’s more, unlike some of the ‘stores’ myNuMo has billing
agreements with the US carriers that support wap-push of content.
There’s no need to type in URL’s or use a credit card. We even are
going to have SMS keywords for every account. So if a band called
‘ROCK99” wanted to have their fans get ringtones at a concert, they
could just tell them to TEXT ROCK99 to 74415. myNuMo will be
supporting text message content as well as mobile blogs.

Think of it this way ... myNuMo is like YouTube + Flickr +
Jamster + eBay + mySpace all rolled up into one. It opens up the
mobile content market to anyone who has any sort of audience.
myNuMo even supports ‘private’ content so a parent could limit sales
pictures and ringtones of their children to their friends and family.

It's simple. Every day millions of people create pictures, music
and videos. Now they can get paid for it.