On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 10:30:24AM -0600, Baden de Bari wrote: > With services like Clickatell, etc, you pay to have your keyword setup > on their shortcode - monthly, right?
I guess. That's more or less the way they do it with the three large mobile carriers here in the Philippines as well. You pay for the initial setup of the service, and thereafter, as people make use of the service the telcos bill money from their subscribers who use the service, and "share" part of these profits with you. In reality, they normally insist on taking the lion's share of the profits for any such service, content to let the MVAS market stagnate... A 75%/25% split in favor of the mobile carrier is to be had only with unparalleled bargaining and good connections, even 60%/40% is unheard of. Is it the same in other countries? But then again, mobile subscriber penetration is approaching 50% in this country, in a nation of 80 million, the potential market is large enough to be profitable even with the unfair rates our mobile carriers force you to agree with. > So let's say you have a service you provide where by someone enters in > "info" and subkeyword, "someone's name" - how do you get the person > who's accessing the data to pay, else you're paying for all the > accessing, right? The way this seems to be done by our mobile carriers (and I'd wager that other mobile carriers elsewhere in the world would do something similar) would be that use of such a shortcode automatically bills the subscriber a little extra (in this country, it's dirt cheap, accounting for its runaway popularity: standard SMS is roughly the equivalent of 2 US cents, and these "infotext" services are usually billed about 5 US cents or thereabouts; services that trigger an MMS download may be billed more). The telco accounting then takes a fairly small portion of the extra profits and gives it to you for your trouble. -- dido Sans les mathematiques on ne penetre point au fond de la philosophie. Sans la philosophie on ne penetre point au fond des mathematiques. Sans les deux on ne penetre au fond de rien.
