Operators Revamping Portals To Attract Users

Operators have been looking to non-voice services to boost ARPU in the face of flagging voice revenue for a while now, and have finally come to the conclusion that one of the main obstacles to the greater uptake of mobile internet usage is the poor design of the portals — at least, the UK operators have. They’re all putting in some effort to make sure their users have a good experience when they access the operators’ portal, reports NMA (sub), after noting that this is after the walled gardens have come down and unlimited data tariffs have been rolled out, which were probably more important.

Orange is planning to make its portal Orange World attractive by personalizing the site to the user. “Our new service is all about promoting access to essential information,” said the spokesman. “A key part of this is a personalised home page.” Orange World gets visits from 2 million of Orange’s 15 million subscribers each month.

Vodafone is banking on big brands to attract people to its Live! portal, signing deals with Google, MySpace, Ebay and Amazon. “Promoting these familiar brands as being easily available on the Live! portal helps to position it as a valuable starting point for consumers to venture onto the web from their phones”…apparently a lot of customers rejected the portal because it was just “ringtones and games” while they wanted “e-mail and internet services”, so Vodafone plans to offer that.

O2 is refreshing its Active portal used by its high-end 3G customers ad changing its 2G version so they’re more similar — the aim is to make the big brands on that portal (Sky, Channel 4, ITV) more simple to reach. “Another technique O2 is to employ will be to bring all its video-on-demand services into one TV category, rather than group them under, say, entertainment. Riddell says that the main driver behind the changes is time.”

The important thing here is that in this way carriers can still have a large amount of control over their users even while offering unrestricted access to the internet, and will still be able to generate revenues from that (even if it’s just as simple as a banner ad across the page). The alternative is for people to just launch a browser and go to (for example) a Yahoo personalized start-up page, but considering the advantages operators have they’d have to really stuff it up to lose out en masse to third party portals.

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