We had written about Webaroo’s Smsgupshup way back in May when we had mentioned that it would surely take the advertising route to monetize this service! And guess what it certainly has! Besides for smsgupshup there is also Mytoday which provides a similar groups smsing service (which also powers WATBlogs sms alerts).
By adding advertising now the sms size on smsgupshup would be 100-120 characters while the rest 40-60 characters would be used to insert text ads. The advertisers will be able to use keywords within the message to select the messages that carry their ads so in effect the ads would be contextual in nature.
Talking about this inclusion of advertising Chirag Jain, VP-India Operations, Webaroo, said, “The broadband Internet penetration in India is still not high, while the mobile penetration is estimated to reach 500 million in the coming years. I feel that predominant usage of the Internet will take place through mobile phones over the years. Corporates need the reach to market their products or services to the masses. And the easiest way in this case to reach the masses is through SMS.”
The other recently funded player in the sms and mobile advertising space is mGinger which has 2 million backing it from VC firm DFJ. There are tonnes of other players as well which we had covered in a round up of sms advertising players earlier. Looking at all this action it seems like my message inbox would be filled with text messages which have ads in them.
I somehow feel users might start developing an irritation or blind spot for such kind of ads. Again i could be wrong but on the whole no relevant or in your face/push advertising would make the user immune and ignorant to the last ew characters in an sms the moment he understands its an ad! This could be a big problem for most of the sms advertising players in the long run. What you think?
So if its sms advertising on one hand there is display mobile ads on the other. Msn India which recently launched its mobile portal msnmobile.in is now wanting to display ads on the same. Joanne Bradford, Corporate VP and Chief Media Officer, Microsoft Corp., said, “Microsoft is continuing to make significant investments in the MSN Mobile portal, adding new services and content that enhance the mobile experience and make it one of the best in the industry. By incorporating advertising on MSN Mobile, we are allowing advertisers to extend their existing campaigns from PCs to games and now to mobile phones, further delivering on our vision to extend advertising across multiple platforms and devices.”
Im not too sure of the effectiveness of mobile display ads. Also as the industry is very nascent in itself most advertisers are themselves experimenting with ads on the mobile medium and are still coming to terms with what benefits it brings.
interesting stuff Rajiv
The push no context ads will definitely fail. I have Vodafone trying to push VAS to me every 30 seconds (assh***s) … Their network is a failure and they have the ba**s to push VAS like crazy.
I think what players like SMS gupshup can do is have a google type model where they can monitor SMS’s sent via their site and then place ads contextually.
Context or no context. Even on the web people become blind to the right column with google ads and its a known fact that click through rates for sponsored search the far lower than normal search. Even with a contextual model over time the reciever of such a message would become immune to the ads. Just like we start changing channels when we watch tv. But Tv still does attract your attention as new interesting visuals invite curiosity but with text on mobile i dont really see that possibility. Infact because sms advertising is so intrusive that its in my face there are more chances ill get annoyed rather than feel like buying anything thats advertised. Its what popups did to the perception about online ads in the minds of the consumers.
Hi guys, I am a PM at SMSGupshup – the points below are my personal opinions, however.
Harshil – You are right. We determne contextuality to a very great extent (one of our products is a search engine variant) and then place ads. I believe that is the way to go instead of sending unsolicited – out of context ads.
Rajiv – Being a blogger and a part of the larger “writing” community, one should not be so opinionated. Google is one of the largest companies in the world – immunity or otherwise.
E.g. we never send an extra SMS – which a lot of our naive competitors do. We always serve the ads as a part of the original SMS – thereby keeping the experience of the user paramount. Do a usability compare with similar copycat products and you can instantly know why we are growing at the pace we are