This Year Was a Bloodbath for Motricity

With the year quickly coming to an end, it's always a good idea to check in on how some of our most-watched stocks are doing. By continually doing our due diligence, we're able to get a sense for where a business is coming from -- and where it's going.

Today, we'll be examining Motricity (Nasdaq: MOTR  ) . Things haven't been pretty for this mobile marketing specialist. Imagine you started the year with $100 -- hoping to grow it -- but by year's end, you had just a $5 bill left.

Sound like a raw deal? Now you know how Motricity shareholders feel. Take a look at the numbers:

Stats on Motricity

Year-to-Date Stock Return	(95.1%)
Market Cap	$41 million
1-Year Revenue Growth	8.5%
1-Year Profit Growth	NM
Short Interest (% of float)	25%
CAPS Rating (out of 5)	***

Sources: Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance, and E*TRADE. NM = not measurable; company has posted net losses over past two quarters.

Why such a party pooper?
To truly appreciate why Motricity has struggled, you need to understand what they do. Their core business is in delivering targeted marketing and advertising to mobile phone carriers. The company counts Sprint Nextel (NYSE: S  ) , Verizon (NYSE: VZ  ) and AT&T (NYSE: T  ) among its customers. All that sounds pretty good; it even got one Fool to buy in a year ago.

Well, here's the problem: When it comes to smartphones, Motricity was way too late to the party. All of their business was tailored to the feature phone market -- which is just a fancy way of saying "any phone that's not a smartphone."

The company was hoping that the smartphone craze was just a North American thing, but signs are increasingly pointing toward that not being the case. Motricity isn't finding a whole lot of business internationally now either, and that's left investors to ponder: Where will growth come from?

Clearly, you're probably better off leaving this stock alone. Without meaningful headwinds in the smartphone market, this stock's as good as dead. You'd be much better off focusing on the three hidden winners of the iPhone, iPad, and Android revolution. We've created a special free report that zeroes in on the three hidden players in the mobile revolution that are underappreciated by the market right now. Get the names of those three companies in your report today -- it's absolutely free!

Click here to add Motricity to My Watchlist, which tracks all of our Foolish analysis and all your other stocks.