Worth Reading?
MEX have a very interesting article about Blyk, a new MVNO in the European cellphone market who are aiming to gather up the 16 to 24 market with the promise of free calls and texts. Due to launch in the UK mid-2007, the deal is that in exchange for all this freeness you are bombarded presented with a variety of demographic-targeted marketing messages; in other words, it’s ad-supported. Blyk are envisaging the income from advertisers being far greater and steadier than the traditionally low ARPU (average revenue per user) user group.
On their blog, Blyk issues a challenge:
“But are you ready, marketeer?
You will get feedback. What’s good and what’s not. You will be told how to develop your offering, products and services. And the feedback comes directly from your customers, real-time. Not from traditional market research.
Are you ready to co-develop your products? Can you change your campaign within two hours, if it doesn’t work? How will you have this dialogue with Blyk users? How will you respond to the feedback?”
It’s an interesting concept, and one which feels very foreign to the typical model of cellphone revenue generation. From what I can remember, past attempts in multiple fields to use advertising as a cost-offset have varied in result from shaky to outright failure; are there any advertisers who can change their campaign within two hours?
I guess it depends on a few things. First, how intrusive are the ads? Is it something like gmail, with a bevy of text ads beside the content, or is it a “CLICK HERE OMG UR A WINNER!!!!1″ thing that floats over all the content on your screen until you click it away?
If it’s the former, I guess I wouldn’t have a problem with it (since I use gmail happily every day). The latter option, on the other hand, would give me pause.
In my case it’s moot because I have no friends.
Blyk is an interesting venture. Surely the crucial factor is whether or not a free service can attract people with money. No one will pay to advertise to users with no spending power so there is a danger that Blyk could end up with a massive pool of users who use it because they can not afford to pay for a service, each one user will have a $ cost to the operation. Too many of these negative cost subscribers would doom it to failure. If it gets the offer right then freebit hunters with money will be attracted, their presence is critical to this MVNO.
For more information about blyk, check out Blyk Blog at blogspot.