It’s been a while since the rash of stories about people unwittingly signing up for mobile content subscriptions and being unable to get off them, but Washington Post has resurrected the issue. In this case it targets Blinko, the mobile portal of Italian company Buongiorno Vitaminic. Verizon Wireless received so many complaints about Blinko it put the company on probation last summer, according to the article, and when the complaints didn’t stop it ended Blinko’s access and sent a free text messages to customers saying they would no longer receive Blinko content or be billed for it…which has got to be quite a blow. Apparently Blinko had 200,000 customers through Verizon — when the telco asked them to verify how many had gone through a “double opt-in” process Blinko couldn’t verify that for about 10,000 customers, or 5 percent of its base. Five percent is a fairly small figure but it’s still significant, and highlights that near enough isn’t good enough — content vendors need to be sure about all their customers, as close to 100 percent as possible.
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