Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 12, 2008 – 12:56 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
“Everybody wants communication, why the hell do we need to pay for that?” That’s Antti Ohrling, founder of BLYK, talking at Youthwatching ‘09 - a marketing conference in Ghent, Belgium. He started a free mobile network for young people, funded by advertising. Mind you, it’s quite a success - BLYK is the fastest growing interactive media outlet for young people in the UK.
Yes, there are actually some British teens lucky enough to make their calls for free. You know how much money that would’ve saved me?
“Most advertising in media shares benefit with the audience. Take the skin creme sample in a magazine for example.”, Ohrling explains. “What’s different for mobile? Exactly, nothing. What would happen if somebody would offer free calls and text for advertising? An operator would become a media company.”
There’s no contract, no phone bill
BLYK focused on youngsters, as they’re a hard to reach but a profitable target group. Ohrling: “If you talk with them and use language they understand, then you have to change to get involved.”
One of the brands British kids most distrusted were operators, so BLYK had to develop a different way to talk to them. Here’s what Ohrling came up with it: there’s no contract, no phone bill. But you do have to get invited. (so that BLYK can get a balanced target audience).
When invited, people had to complete personal profile online so that BLYK can target the advertising better. 95% of the 200,000 people did so.
Does it work?
“If there’s a balance between value for advertisers and customers, BLYK is a success”. Well, it seems like that’s the case. The 2000 campaigns had a 25% average response rate. Normally this rate for mobile advertising is four percent. BLYK has 200 brands on board, of which 66 percent did repeated business.
The obviously proud BLYK founder mentions some success stories. Like a Will Ferrel trailer, 44 percent of the users requested to see it. A Penguin book, Slam by Nick Horby, was also a blast on BLYK. 67 percent wanted to hear a Skins star reading the first chapter out loud. Lucozade supplied users with free drink vouchers. 35 percent was redeemed.
Closing in on YouTube and Facebook
BLYK has the highest net advocacy score among mobile networks in the UK and is closing in on YouTube and Facebook. Why? Ohrling: “In mobile marketing, interaction is key. The power of the question is much higher than the power of the answer. Make people think, and they engage with you. If they engage, you’re in the game. We’re in the game”.
British youngsters become slaves to advertising to avoid paying phone bills. Why wouldn’t they? What are the negative consequences for them? Other than clicking ads away.., none.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on September 11, 2008 – 9:04 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Twitter founder Evan Williams tweetpoints (I totally coined that term!) to a job listing for the company on Craigslist, which shows at least one direction Twitter is turning in the infamous search for a business model. The position offered is one for a ‘Partner Relations Coordinator’, and these are the tidbits that reveal a little more about where it’s heading:
“Each month, Twitter gets contacted by hundreds of businesses, consumer brands, events, celebrities, non-profits, agencies and other organizations who want to use Twitter in various ways. The goal of the Partner Relations Coordinator is to work with these entities, while maximizing our relationships and opportunities with current/future partners to grow the Twitter community worldwide.”
You could say that this is partly a customer service role, and that would be true. But this also shows Twitter is looking for more ways to engage with partners and help them use Twitter. I’m sure that eventually, the company will start charging for some of these services.
I realize I’m stating some obvious things here and that there’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff to be found, but it’s interesting to see them starting to think about what to do with the microsharing service now that it has quite some adoption and momentum going for it.
Two of the roles for the new hire will be:
Identify strategic new potential partners in key verticals, including live events/festivals, music (and others TBD) to onboard them to Twitter.
Implement partner programs and processes, including managing database and tracking effectiveness of resulting partner campaigns.
Partners? Verticals? Databases? Tracking effectiveness? Campaigns?
Sure smells like marketing to me. :)
Written on August 21, 2008 – 2:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Dutch start-up VIDDIX (review here) has received €100.000 in a first round of funding. The Dutch Creative Industry Fund (DCIF) has invested €50.000. The Netspider Group and an angel made up for the other €50.000.
VIDDIX, which started as a study project and launched in February this year, can be best described as a combination between YouTube and Slideshare. The video is playing at a panel on the left, while different web content - such as slides, pictures, YouTube videos, HTML and Flash embeds - shows up in a so-called iPanel at the right.
DCIF’s financial injection in VIDDIX is bigger than the fund regularly gives. Gert-Jan Bennen, fund manager, said in the release: “We’re investing in VIDDIX because its tool is a valueable contribution to existing webvideo services (..). We foresee a good role for this tool in the future of online video.” The Dutch fund normally invests between €20.000 and €40.000, says their website.
Example of VIDDIX video featuring my co-editor Boris
VIDDIX CEO Sébastien Willems is particularly excited about the network of DCIF. He told Emerce that his company is already negotiating with Holland’s largest Internet publisher, Ilse Media. VIDDIX is also working with onine shopping giant Bol.com, the results of which we will see at the end of this year.
In the comments on my review of VIDDIX, Edo van Santen en “1234gybotf” raised questions about VIDDIX’s business model. Turns out that the video company is aiming at a B2B approach, while offering the service for free to normal users. Sounds like a solid plan to me.
Written on August 14, 2008 – 3:05 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference
Earlier today we wrote about Twitter’s decision to stop sending text messages to phones outside the US, Canada, and India. Due to an essential difference between business models of US and European mobile operators, the costs became too high.
How Twitter and mobile operators make money in the US
The difference is how these operators handle MT and MO Text messages.
- A MO message is sent from a mobile phone (to for instance Twitter).
- An MT message is sent from a server to a mobile phone (the Twitter update message).
In the US you pay for sending a text message, but also for receiving a text message. Parties like Twitter who send massive amounts of text messages generate a lot of money for the SMS gateways (or mobile operators). Twitter has a lot of bargaining power and can manage to get 1) the outgoing message for free and 2) a kickback on every delivered message. In other words, the consumer pays for receiving the updates, the carrier earns a bit and Twitter gets a tiny kickback.
A European user costs Twitter up to 7.5 to 10 euros per week
In Europe you only pay for sending the text message. So Twitter is bleeding with every message sent. The costs of sending huge amounts of messages still is around 3 a 4 euro cents per message. So every European Twitter dude can cost up to (250 times 0.03 cent) 7.5 euros to 10 euros per week! That’s obviously not a scalable model.
Option 1: reversed billing
European SMS gateways do offer the possibility to charge the receiver via a so-called reversed billed SMS. The process to charge people via a reversed billed SMS is that you send a message to a short code (e.g. Twitter on to 4200). But the huge disadvantage here is that the total costs of these messages are way higher. A reversed billed SMS costs the receiver normally between 0.25 and 1.50 euros (determined up front by the value added service -in this case Twitter-). Twitter would get a kickback of about 50% of the amount charged, but you can imagine that there are less then zero people willing to pay 25 cents per tweet!
Option 2: a kind mobile operator
Another option is to partner with the operators who would allow Twitter to send the messages for free - hoping that people who receive the message would send one back (to generate revenue). I don’t think that there is one mobile operator who would want to do this, because there is an inter operator charge to deliver a message on a different network of around 1.5 euro cents. And the possible ‘extra’ revenue is far from guaranteed.
Option 3: a pro account
The only viable option I can see is to offer users a PRO account. It makes perfect sense to me: get me some extra cool features and I’ll pay Twitter for it.
Why use SMS anyway?
One more thing. Why use SMS anyhow? It is the most expensive way of transporting data and there are free alternatives. What about twittering per email or via mobile web (For iPhone users there are tons of solutions to work around SMS).
Written on August 7, 2008 – 12:03 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Balsamiq Mockups is a new product launched on the Adobe AIR platform which allows developers to make mockups of their designs in no time. Think MSWord for hackers. Since its launch a few short months ago Balsamiq mockups has taken the hacker community by storm. Why? This is one of those rags to riches stories that inspire us all.
Developed by Peldi Guilizzoni (a one man band) working out of Bologna (Italy) who was inspired by 37signals mantras and Paul Graham (HN) to ‘create something people want’. Balsamiq Mockups is now following in the footsteps of past masters and amazingly has gone into profitability from almost the get go. And what’s more this self funded project is now turning over thousands of dollars each month.
The beauty of this product is its elegance, it solves the pain of hackers who have long since forgotten where the pen and paper is located (bottom draw guys), it allows quick and editable drafts to be created of potential design ideas. The user interface is completely intuitive (no instructions needed) and results are quickly achieved.
When so many large companies with millions of dollars in VC backing are chasing the elusive Web2.0 biz model, hunting down huge numbers of users who they intend spamming later, this makes a very refreshing change. The execution of this plan is perfect. Peldi has managed to capture the attention of his target market (hackers and developers) with stories of his progress, which in turn have initiated interesting debates on Hacker News.
So far Balsamiq Mockups has been covered by over 100 blogs (this is the 101th blog post!) yet still absent from this entourage is any mention from TechCrunch. This is one of those products that will make it onto the stage of the foremost Tech startup blog, it’s a good human story and more inspiring than the news bites that so and so has just been granted another round of X. Come on TC, show this man some luv.
Way to go Peldi, have a bottle of Chianti for me.
A quick demonstration of Balsamiq Mockups: building an iTunes-like UI in two minutes:
Written on July 9, 2008 – 5:19 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Wall Street Journal has an important web story today, as they’ve found two sources willing to talk a bit about YouTube’s advertisement plans. YouTube only makes $200 million a year with advertising. Yes, “only”, as you might expect a video service with over a billion video views each day to come up with a little more ad revenue. This gets the executives at Google a bit nervous, as they still have to justify the 1.65 billion acquisition. Therefor, they’re thinking of drastic measures - like pre-roll ads all over the place.
One of the - unfortunately anonymous - sources said that a review executed by Google North America advertising president Tim Armstrong had identified an impressive number of 105 problems within the ad-selling division. This review is part of Project Spaghetti, a nickname for the extensive evaluation of the YouTube advertisement plan that will end before or during Q3. Although Armstrong seems worried about offending the audience of YouTube, he WILL adopt pre- and post-rolls. At least, that’s what the secret sources say.
This probably will alienate some of the YouTube users, but most people will just take it for granted. There are ads on TV too.. And this group gets more important, as they’ll become more profitable for Google. So the increasing revenues will make up for the few thousand people that find a different video home.
[Via paidcontent.org]
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
