“Sri Lankan operator, Dialog has appointed Celltick to manage its interactive mobile media service Zero77 LIVE. Under the agreement, Celltick will be responsible for raising revenues for Dialog by managing all aspects of the service including editorial content, programming, content alliances and advertising sales.

Zero77 LIVE, powered by Celltick’s LiveScreen Media, began broadcasting to a test subscriber base of 120,000 and is now open to all Dialog subscribers. Zero77 LIVE delivers carefully targeted content and marketing messages directly to subscribers’ mobile idle screens, turning them into a network of synchronised, interactive personal billboards.”

Right now, generating income from text messages is a bit of a fuzzy area, depending on how you propose to do it. If you have the time and money, reverse-charge or premium SMS numbers (or short codes) can be set up with operators. Premium SMS would charge the user a premium amount per message sent, and you would get around 50% of the income depending on the arrangement. If you’re running a global operation then you’d need to set up these arrangements in every country with every operator, which would not be fun and quite likely take years. If it’s a service in a single country, then this makes sense and is a good way forward. Just bear in mind you need to pay a ‘rental’ fee for the number, and the operator is going to take quite a large percentage of your income in commission and fees (50% is an average).

It’s a different matter for services with global reach. One of the few ways you’d be able to monetise your texts here would be to come to an arrangement, say, with an advertiser and agree to tag short adverts at the end of your messages (the advertiser would have to trust that you did!). You could also charge a subscription fee for the service, but that would require a certain amount of administration since the customer would not be able to pay you through their phone (PayPal might be an option, but you’d need to then have a system which kept track of who was, and wasn’t, out of contract, so you could remove them from your lists).

Taking money directly from mobile users remains tricky, with no easy solution in sight. Software such as FrontlineSMS allows you to set up a standard messaging hub, but only using standard SMS. If you go the premium SMS and/or short code routes then the operators usually provide you with the tools you need to make it work, which is paid for out of the commissions they take.

Ken

This is especially if we are to expand our breaking news operation to in-depth reports with more journalists on the field travelling, cross-checking information etc.

(As an aside, our spending on journalists is also woefully inadequate at the moment, an industry-wide problem in Sri Lanka)

We had wire subscriptions, but now we actually divert all such resources to our team of journalists. We hardly use wire content as it defeats the purpose of creating useful new content and building the JNW brand.

The key point for us is that we are trying to explore alternative to the advertising model on the web and media so that advertising isn’t forced down consumers’ throats.

If we weren’t, we could look at RSS-type dissemination on various web/non web formats, that also contain advertising, as a revenue model.

As a media entity I think there are definite pitfalls to relying on advertising where there may be pressure to hold back news reports critical of key advertisers.

On social costs, I think there are large costs when forcing advertising on people rather than offering them a choice, and even more so when advertisements are not whetted by any authority for standards, such as in Sri Lanka, as far as I am aware.