I have been saying for over a decade that carriers need to explore ways to deliver enhanced services.<\/p>\n
To be fair, some companies are doing this. AT&T has done an amazing job partnering with Apple (the way I hear it, Verizon declined <\/a>to work with Apple which is why AT&T had the option) and then they have further offered <\/a>Pandora radio as a $10\/month service.<\/p>\n I got to thinking about these services as I was reading an eComm<\/a> 2008 wrap up<\/a> from Jon Arnold<\/a> where he discusses the future of service providers. <\/p>\n One of the points made by Jon is that advertising revenue pales in comparison to current subscriber revenues and as such carriers need to focus on innovating.<\/p>\n While I agree with this notion, I do believe carriers must consider advertising as a major revenue source. Moreover, advertising revenue models of the old days pale in comparison to what is possible with the web, interactive television and location based services.<\/p>\n I have written before about the potential for mobile providers to supply customers with intimately targeted ads based on location and I am still awaiting the fantastic services of the future.<\/p>\n Perhaps the biggest problem service providers face is cultural. Google is an example of a company that seems to be trying to virtually corner the market on developers and then let them loose to develop all sorts of interesting services.<\/p>\n The company innovates for the sake of innovating and some of their ideas are great while others are not.<\/p>\n It would seem as the world gets more saturated with mashups and countless other interesting services, people will be bombarded with useful things to try. <\/p>\n The massive arsenal of developers Google enjoys today will translate tomorrow into that many more eyeballs and users of the company’s services.<\/p>\n Service providers today have to continue with existing business models such as competing with cablecos and building better and faster wireless base stations while simultaneously transforming themselves into development houses.<\/p>\n Another option is to partner with software companies that get it. Perhaps social media providers with open APIs can be of some use.<\/p>\n It just seems to me that in a web 2.0 world, you need to consider advertising supported services as a way to pay for your efforts.<\/p>\n Let’s face it… Things are becoming free faster than service providers would have hoped. Long distance phone calling is one example and now with base station triangulation we get free pseudo-GPS.<\/p>\n But it doesn’t stop there… Consider directory assistance, e-mail, storage, applications, classifieds, news, games, fantasy sports, advice, etc.<\/p>\n Yes Jon, service providers need to innovate but will there be anyone with any time left to pay for the services these companies provide?<\/p>\n I fear that in the future, all service providers need to consider advertising as a viable way to generate revenue.<\/p>\n This does not mean that people will not pay for things like streamed radio over cellular networks but to cover all bases, you should consider diving deep into ad-supported business models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been saying for over a decade that carriers need to explore ways to deliver enhanced services. To be fair, some companies are doing this. AT&T has done an amazing job partnering with Apple (the way I hear it, Verizon declined to work with Apple which is why AT&T had the option) and then<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[158,168,171,180,172,160,212,199,218,156,189,203,118,177,174,190,191,205,219,175,1675],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6675"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.tmcnet.com\/blog\/rich-tehrani\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}