There’s the old saying that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In much the same way, if you stack a panel about off-deck content with three of five people selling different content billing solutions, they’re going to tell you the problem holding back the market is broken billing systems. Thus went the Razing the Garden Wall: Making the Leap to Off Portal panel at CTIA.
Various operators’ billing systems do represent an impediment to success — both for content providers and for the operators themselves. But looking at the off-deck market purely from a billing perspective is to overlook the market’s true potential, argued one of the non-billing providers on the panel, Novarra CEO Jayanthi Rangarajan. She said the discussion, and the off-portal market overall, needed to focus on what consumers want: “A very narrow definition of what consumers want [from mobile content] is to buy something all the time.”
On the potential of ad-supported content: Andrew Bud, the founder and executive chairman of mBlox argued rather vociferously that shifting to ad-supported models is a terrible move for mobile, and one that threatens the mobile content industry. “The internet never had a good way of getting people to pay for things,” he said. “So they were forced to go to advertising.”
Steven Spencer, the CEO of Upoc Networks, posited that the real threat of mobile advertising is to assume that the same practices and models that work on the web will translate directly to mobile. “The wrong thing for mobile advertising is to mimic the internet,” he said.
Internet vs. Mobile: Bud kept building up the fight between the internet and mobile, saying the choice the industry needed to make was whether to take the lessons it had learned this far from “the massive mobile content business” and invent a new business model for it, or to try and extend the internet and its business models to mobile — a move that’s doomed to fail.
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