There are a plethora of things you can do on your mobile today, the SMS feature being exploited the most. You get constant updates on your phone regarding various events and advertisements. You get annoyed deleting messages that you wish you would stop getting. We have analysed how the group sms business has gone in the last few years. While Smsgupshup has gone the user generated route and also taken a ton of funding and positioned itself as a social network over sms.
MyToday which is its competitor has always taken the publisher route and has provide alerts across various streams which are moderated and controlled by the Mytoday content team. MyToday has now taken this to another level by making the sms services paid @ Rs.5-10 per month as per this announcement Rajesh Jain of Netcore Solutions (The company behind MyToday).
They have a suite of 200 paid channels on which topics range from astrology, bollywood, business, health, jokes to news, spiritual, sports and miscellaneous. These subscriptions start from Rs. 5 per month, while most of the channels charge Rs. 10 per month. They have content from content partners like Rajshri Media, MyIris, The Economist, Knowledge@Wharton and AstroCAMP as well.
It seems Mytoday is finding a paid business model in a business that was largely run free for the time being. The big roadblock I see is the payment method using credit cards. Atleast thats what the FAQs section updates me on how they charge. I would have thought they would have gone the mobile operator route of charging users but I guess in that way they lose atleast 70% of the share shelled out by users. Also operators have their own sms alert services for various topics so it seems unlikely they would give in to Mytoday. Question is how are the existing subscribers updated about this change in charges? Or does the charges apply only to new subscribers?
