We have two mobile advertising startups in India – mGinger and adMad which use the internet as medium, lets users sign up to receive mobile advertisements as SMS and pay the user to read those advertisements. Recall AllAdvantage.Com, a which startup had raised $200 million and was liberally paying web surfers to surf the web displaying its banner. The company went out of business after having paid $160 Million. [I had received $40 as well :-)] Alladvantage Nostalgic site is here.
I wrote to the managements of both – mGinger and adMad and raised few questions to which their was no reply. I fail to understand their process of targetting internet users to read mobile ads. Like AllAdvantage.Com how long are they willing to pay users to read Ads ? As long as the BSE Sensex is rising 🙂
More serious contenders in the mobile marketing space are the telcos themselves. The GSM association is building a Mobile marketing platform and they have far better tools to target ads. Bharti Airtel introduced SMS 2.0 the next generation graphics based mobile advertising platform. Tata Indicom has also unveiled Interactive Mobile Advertising program ahead of Reliance. These operators also have a well established network to book offline ads from SMEs / SMBs in various tier-II cities where Internet awareness is ridiculous. Can mGinger and adMad really surive ? Do they have some killer technology like Salar Kamngar’s adSense ?
Tags: Mobile India, Startups, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing
Quite an insightful and nostalgic analysis 🙂
We have recently launched a service on 160by2.com in India that aims to be a serious contender in mobile marketing space. We have been getting terrific response from our users as well as small & large advertisers.
Will be keen to get your feedback on 160by2.
Sanyog:
I read on your website that,
…ads that are served into the messages are contextual, served by our patent pending ad server engine….
So you have the next Salar Kamangar working for you 😉 I don’t see any patents from mGinger or AdMad yet. But they may change the direction and start following you 🙂
Sanyog.. gimme a call BLR – 9945588332. Lets see if we have anything mutually beneficial. Once aviled your service.. i can opine with facts and figures.. thx n regards,
I just don’t understand what difference it makes for the advertisers when they use mGinger or any of its ilk. Even now, they can send out thousands of (Context based using profile) ad messages to phones through the operator, and frankly, no one looks at it. With mGinger, people will get paid to recieve SMS, but there is no surety that the ad will be read. So the advertisers end up gaining nothing. Remember, SMS ads are different from Banners on web pages, which you may not be able to avoid.
So in the long run, if no value is getting added to the advertisers, the service will fail.