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* Web tracking firm combines computer, mobile data in singleview
* Mobile data available for selected countries, eventuallyglobal
By Eric Auchard
LONDON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - The mobile Internet economyremains mostly uncharted territory for app publishers, theircompetitors, the advertisers who support them, and investorsdeciding where to place their bets.
Now Israeli start-up SimilarWeb Ltd. is expanding itsservice for measuring computer usage into the mobile Internetrealm and the apps where users spend the overwhelming bulk oftheir time on smartphones.
Apps are the dedicated applications users have come to relyon rather than surfing the web for information. Apps are handierand store data locally, allowing people to use them whether ornot they have a solid data connection.
Tel Aviv-based SimilarWeb introduced new services last weekthat give industry players and researchers a unified view ofdesktop computer, mobile Internet and mobile app activity amongusers, first in the United States and Britain, and thenworldwide in coming months.
"SimilarWeb brings a transparency to the Internet economynever known before," says Marco Rodzynek, founder of NOAHAdvisors Ltd., a pan-European corporate finance boutique forInternet firms who previously headed media and Internetinvestment banking at Lehman Brothers Europe.
As human activity goes mobile, it no longer makes sense torely on tracking only sedentary computer users for activitieslike shopping or dining out, for example.
Global consumer ecommerce sales alone are expected to reachnearly US$1.5 trillion in 2014 while spending on onlineadvertising will top $140 billion, according to estimates byresearch firm eMarketer.
A recent Citi report forecast app store revenue will top $23billion globally in 2014, up 43 percent from a year ago.
FILLING IN THE GAPS
SimilarWeb gathers big pools of anonymised user data from amix of sources to statistically analyse millions of sites, andmore recently, mobile app activity. It turns this into rankingsby country and sector category relative to peers.
"We measure how users engage with websites and mobile apps,and which destinations they use more than others," SimilarWebCo-founder and Chief Executive Or Offer said in an interview.
SimilarWeb has received about $25 million in backing frominvestors led by Naspers Ltd., the South Africanelectronic media company which holds a 26 percent stake.
Other backers include top Israeli venture investors MosheLichtman of Israel Growth Partners, Yossi Vardi, the godfatherof the Israeli start-up scene and Britain's David Alliance.
What passes for mobile measurement now comes from sites ledby AppAnnie and Yahoo's Flurry, which mainly focus onanalysing initial downloads of apps. How much consumers usethose apps and where they go from there is terra incognita.
"If SimilarWeb can replicate existing Web measurement toolsin the app domain, they will have something really special,"said IDC mobile analyst John Jackson said, speaking of thegeneral limitations of mobile Internet measurement.
Most Web analytics firms focus on single national markets,mainly the United States, or track usage in only a handful ofdeveloped countries, making it hard to verify competitive claimsby Web or mobile firms in the rest of the world.
SimilarWeb's closest peers are U.S.-focused Compete, a unitof WPP's Millward Brown and Experian Plc's Hitwise, which monitors the U.S. and six other major countries.
ComScore, the biggest player in Web tracking, hasshifted increasingly into advertising measurement and isespecially strong in so-called display, or banner ad analytics.Active in 172 countries, it focuses largely on big-budgetclients to help them analyse where to spend their ad dollars.
SimilarWeb tracks Internet and mobile use in more than 200countries, offering standardised rankings for site traffic inthe top 55 Web countries, including lesser-known markets such asColombia, India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine. It targetssearch and social media marketing and, now, mobile strategy.
SimilarWeb is weighing its financing options and aims for aninitial public offering in 2016, CEO Offer said.
Offer remains cagey about financial results, saying onlythat company sales are currently in the "double-digit millions"in terms of dollars.
Analyst Jackson sees a market to be conquered by the companythat gets tracking right.
"The world's eyeballs are going mobile. The ad spend isgoing mobile. I don't think anyone has won the contest the waythat Nielsen once did with measuring broadcast television," hesaid. (1 euro = 1.2682 US dollar) (Reporting By Eric Auchard; editing by Keith Weir)
