It takes two to Twango

24th July 2007

You've probably never heard of Twango, unless you're Nokia or the people who just sold it to them - but Nokia are hoping to use Twango to carve out a slice of the user-generated contact market and compete head on with the likes or Flickr and YouTube. According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal is worth "less than" €70m / $100m which is a little vague, but assume that the figure is certainly tens of millions of dollars.

User generated content is the big thing at the moment - we recently looked at the Samsung L760 "YouTube" phone and devices such as the Nokia N73 can already upload directly to Flickr. Buying Twango will allow Nokia to create a service that photos, video clips and audio can be uploaded to - and that content can be made available on a mobile phone, or a PC or Mac.

When we looked at the SGH-L760, we said that the potential ease-of-use was the key thing. If Nokia can make it really easy to share multimedia with their phones, then there's a good chance that it will appeal to customers.

In principle it looks good.. but in reality Nokia are paying Twango for technology, not for the existing visitors to Twango.com. According to Quantcast, Twango gets only around 40,000 US visitors per month (rank 55,000 globally), Compete says around 51,000 US visitors monthly. In fact, Twango attracts slightly less visitors than Mobile Gazette according to these Alexa stats.. and we can tell you that nobody is likely to offer us tens of millions of dollars any time soon ^{[see note]}.

It would have been much more impressive if Nokia has spent a stack of cash on something we'd heard of - but as it is, Nokia will need to take the technology from Twango and push it very hard to consumers. If the technology is good enough and Nokia can promote it hard enough then we suppose that it's possible that Twango could be the next YouTube. In any case, Nokia seem to think that it's worth a try.

Nokia's plan is to announce the future shape of the Nokia/Twango service some time next year, so don't expect to see any changes soon. A full FAQ about the takeover is available here.

Note: just to be boring, we pull in around 380,000 unique visitors per month only 9% of which are from the US. Yes, we know that Alexa stats need to be taken with a pinch of salt. And we would be very happy to consider multi-million dollar cash offers, the closer to $100m the better. And we're sorry about the awful pun in the headline too.