Mobile Ads
Phonescoop posted about a few carriers trying out advertising, seemingly as an opt in feature and delivered as video. I’m actually all in favor of advertising supported services on the mobile end. Contextual advertising has brought online advertising in general out of the gutter that it was in. Businesses are starting to spring up which are viably and sustainably based on advertising revenue. I think advertising and/or affiliate based services on the mobile end makes good sense.
What I’m concerned about is that carriers just are not good at working with alternative business models. I wouldn’t be too surprized if we saw carriers trying to charge for the data traffic caused by delivering ads, as the folks at Engadget have joked about. I think advertising would work, but it needs to be done correctly. And like everything else in the mobile environment it’s made somewhat more complex by the limited devices and relatively low speed and high latency networks involved. I also think there are a lot of opportunities for media companies and established brands looking for additional reach to provide content to carriers. The PSP portal and XBox online both offer free downloads of movie trailers. I think that kind of content would be very well suited to handset delivery. As long as we can keep the carriers from trying to charge the media companies to put out the video AND the users to subscribe to the service and for the bandwidth used during the download I think there would be some interest. Overcoming the user expectation that their carrier is once again trying to screw them also factors in there.
