{"id":258,"date":"2009-05-17T21:15:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T21:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vhirsch.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/17\/blyk-scraps-it-no-it-doesnt\/"},"modified":"2009-05-17T21:15:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-17T21:15:00","slug":"blyk-scraps-it-no-it-doesnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/17\/blyk-scraps-it-no-it-doesnt\/","title":{"rendered":"Blyk scraps it! No, it doesn't!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Blyk<\/a>, the ad-funded MVNO for 16-24 year-olds has been in the news lately a lot. The trigger was a piece by NMA<\/a> according to which Blyk had announced it would scrap its consumer offering and concentrate on selling its technology\/concept\/both to other operators. This was quickly refuted<\/a> by Blyk. The “final” position appears to being a little unclear.<\/p>\n

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Now, quite a while ago, I issued concerns about the viability of their business model as a stand-alone ad-funded MVNO (see here<\/a>), and I stand by it (even if they have varied their model a little recently: from 217 free messages and 43 minutes of free calls per month to a \u00a315 discount voucher). If they now claim that this was “only” a proof of concept, I must say that this smacks more than a bit of hopeful PR although this may just be semantics:<\/div>\n
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The pitfalls of an MVNO-only model aside, their approach is rather intriguing: if you can segment the market as they do and thus create consumer (or people) clusters that are much more homogenous than most media will be able to assemble (18-49-year-olds anyone?), you have a fairly powerful opportunity to interact with your people more directly, more intensely and – most importantly – more relevant messages than you otherwise could. And this has value, and lots of it!<\/div>\n
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\"\"<\/p>\n

Combine this now with the headaches of your ordinary operator, of which the biggest one probably (still) is churn. I am lacking current accurate numbers but, historically, an operator’s churn rate (the percentage of users it would lose in 12 months) was up to 1\/3. And this is painful, very painful! So get a tool that allows to reduce that churn significantly and you’re off to the races. Combine this with a (functioning because highly targeted) advertising model and you can even increase your margins on this model. Sounds good? Certainly does to me!<\/div>\n
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And so it is not a big surprise that other operators are said to have shown a lot of interest in the model. Vodafone, for one, have had their own advertising-related announcement<\/a> in the last week, and the use of Blyk’s model and expertise could be quite compelling to them (as some voices already suggest<\/a>). From Blyk’s point of view, such a model is also easier and more quickly scalable than a stand-alone expansion and it should therefore greatly aid Blyk to build the critical mass it needs to stay (or become) relevant to advertisers.<\/div>\n
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It might still fly, you know…<\/div>\n
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Image credit: http:\/\/asetcenter.net\/images\/article\/mobile_adv.jpg<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blyk, the ad-funded MVNO for 16-24 year-olds has been in the news lately a lot. The trigger was a piece by NMA according to which Blyk had announced it would scrap its consumer offering and concentrate on selling its technology\/concept\/both to other operators. This was quickly refuted by Blyk. The “final” position appears to being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[24,32,86,393,446,494,697],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-ad-funded","tag-advertising","tag-blyk","tag-mobile-advertising","tag-mvno","tag-orange","tag-vodafone"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paSwZv-4a","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vhirsch.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}