Wikimedia Mobile engineering/imported/Mobile projects/strategy

= Product strategy =

The strategic objectives of the Foundation apply to mobile in the following priority:


 * Increase in mobile page views to 2 billion/mo by end of 2012, 1 billion readers by 2015
 * Strong growth in Global South readers and female contributors
 * Editor retention and new editor engagement

The aggressive growth in page views will consist of organic growth and audience expansion. Marketing efforts for audience expansion can be enhanced greatly by mobile carriers. Therefore, it makes sense to partner with mobile carriers in the Global South, where readership can be greatly expanded in large mobile populations. We achieve two strategic goals at once by increasing readership in the Global South.

To achieve these objectives, the following rough global breakdown is helpful:

Assumptions
Needless to say, these numbers are approximate and gross generalizations. The variations among individual countries can be large. For example, India is dominated by Nokia and Samsung feature phones, but smartphone growth is rapid, albeit among a small minority of the population (primarily young males). Whereas most of Africa is still dominated by feature phones and no-data feature phones. Both regions represent enormous populations in the Global South (roughly 1 billion and 700 million, respectively).

An important assumption when evaluating mobile populations is the difference between installed base and new phones. Most publicly available handset figures refer to new phone sales, because it is easier to track new shipments. So in many parts of the world, smartphone shipments can be 30% or more of all new phone sales. However, the percentage of new phones versus phones in use may vary considerably between countries. Put another way, the rate at which phones are replaced can vary tremendously.

As an example of the potential variation among countries, the Japanese mobile market has undergone large and rapid changes in recent years. Some regulatory measures like Mobile Number Portability and reduced handset subsidies by carriers have caused handset turnover to increase from a typical timeframe of six months, to two years! At the same time, iPhone popularity took several years to take hold and for many people the iPhone is a second phone. In addition, Android has been adopted en masse by Docomo and au (the largest and second-largest carriers) and currently most new phones are Android based. So over time, Android will become a dominant part of the installed base, but even after several years the percentage of phones in use that are Android may be less than a majority.

Conclusions
In consideration of the above, several conclusions can be reached:


 * Mobile readership in the Global South is overall of highest strategic importance


 * The goal of product strategy in the Global South is to enhance readership, simply because editing on feature phones is highly restricted


 * While smartphone readership is important in developed countries, strategically the editor-related strategic objectives are a priority

This results in two parallel development paths:

1) carrier-focused readership expansion in the Global South, and

2) smartphone-based editing- or engagement-related features

A final factor to consider is that there are many third-party apps for smartphones that do a good job of improving the reading experience of Wikipedia. This removes some of the urgency of implementing these features. Let's focus more on editor retention and new editor engagement, which are higher priority anyway.

Finally, there are five ways to provide Wikipedia to carriers, all of which can be zero-rated (no charge for data access):


 * Wikipedia Zero in browser
 * RSS feeds of Article of the Day or In the News
 * Android app
 * J2ME app for reading WIkipedia (could also be zero-rated)
 * USSD/SMS for search and basic reading

The first three will be developed internally and the last two will be developed with partners. More information about carrier services can be found here.