People.com has teamed up with mobile services firm Crisp Wireless to debut People.com Mobile. The site was created and hosted in conjunction with launch partner Samsung, which sponsored the entire site and text alerts for the launch.
“We feel it’s an important extension of the brand and think that mobile offers significant reach,” said John Paris, director of mobile products for parent company Time Inc. “A recent study by Nielsen reported that the mobile Web can actually extend a brand’s audience reach 13% over the PC— 22% in the entertainment category.”
The mobile site, at m.people.com, will feature People.com-branded content including news updates, celebrity photos and videos. Headlines will link to short articles, which will link to longer stories.
“Mobile consumption is quite different from online — the average user time is two minutes, so we tried to make it easy to go on and get the latest headlines,” said Paris. “But because consumers are sometimes stuck in the airport with only their phones, the full article is there.”
The site lets users opt in for SMS alerts or e-mail newsletters, share content with friends via e-mail and SMS and post articles to Facebook and other social bookmarking sites.
Crisp Wireless will provide ad sales support for the People.com mobile site, which will include impressions in the form of site sponsorships, banner ads, photo gallery interstitial ads and video pre-rolls. People’s mobile ad team will look to extend the advertising relationship with its existing advertisers. Paris said that about two-thirds of mobile advertising at Time Inc. is an extension of print and online buys.
