Bango has reported huge growth in cross-border mobile content sales,
with 30% of purchases from its growing community of content providers
crossing country borders, compared to just 5% a year ago. The mobile
web is helping businesses to reach overseas markets and with more
people searching for content, this trend is expected to grow to 55% or
more within the next year, the company says. 
Businesses often start by selling mobile content in their own
country,” says Bango Senior VP of Marketing, Anil Malhotra. But they
soon realize they have visitors from all around the world with minimal
promotional effort. Because Bango solutions are global, businesses can
leverage the mobile web to quickly and easily capture sales from a
world-wide audience.”
This experience is markedly different from the Premium SMS model, says
Bango. With Premium SMS, content providers sold their content country
by country, doing specific promotions and setting billing for each
region they wanted to sell into. With Bango, content providers simply
plug into the Bango platform once and can collect payments from over
150 countries world-wide on the mobile web for one monthly fee of as
little as 299 for the Bango Focus package.
Content providers often stimulate cross-border sales by publishing
their mobile URL on their website, get listed in mobile search engines
such as Google and Yahoo! or pay for sponsored links within the search
results.
We drive traffic to our mobile sites using search marketing through
Yahoo!, Google and other search engines, as well as mobile advertising
networks,” says Giles Richardson, VP Consumer Marketing at Mobile
Streams, whose sites, which include Ringtones.com, are engineered
specifically to receive traffic in this way.
“We see increasing numbers of visitors from across Europe, the US and
Asia Pacific as access and use of the mobile web grows. Bango detects
from which country the user originates, so we offer the best payment
method for the user in that country. This is key to increasing the all
important conversion rate, essential if you have just paid for the
click”