Am I right or what?!

I’ve been blogging about the Mobile internet since Jan of this year and the theme has been that of not going down the route of the Internet where all services are free and monetized through advertising.

I’m not saying that there is no role for ad supported services on the mobile...there might be, but not at present.

The trouble with giving away free mobile internet services is that we are destroying a perfectly great economic model that is prevalent in the mobile phone services industry. Subscribers are willing and quite used to paying for services available on their mobile devices which would be available for free on the internet. Millions of subscribers across the world pay sms subscription fees for sports scores, horoscopes and even news. They download Games, ringtones, wallpapers from Carrier decks. However, there’s a new breed of content services companies who are trying to replicate and extend their FREE SERVICES model straight from the internet on to the mobile. So they give away scores, news, astro, and other web services for free on the mobile internet hoping to translate them into page views and thus monetize through advertising. Unfortunately, this has not really been successful till now.

Carriers are too unaware or turning a blind eye to these free services on the mobile internet (since it helps them sell data plans!). In the long run however, a great foundation laid will have been destroyed- where carriers end up being Wireless ISP ‘dumb pipes’ with no control over content/services and content companies that will worryingly kill the golden goose of paying subscribers.

Here is a similar opinion in an article published in the NYT on April 5. Very interesting.…wonder If they’ve been reading my blog? :)