Bye-bye Blyk: the ad-supported mobile operator closes shop
THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED SEE: http://www.gomonews.com/the-blyk-saga-updated/
As early as last week, I heard the the praises of mobile operator Blyk being sung at a mobile advertising conference in London. The Blyk model of offering real incentives, like free SMS and voice minutes, to customers in return for advertising was seen as a method with real potential. It’s a shame, then, that Blyk has announced that it can no longer sustain it’s own model.
Blyk has announced that it will be closing down it’s consumer offering, and concentrating instead on deals with operators. The company has apparently not been able to attain the number of customers it needed to keep the model afloat, and will now be selling it’s advertising technology to other operators. Orange, O2 and Vodafone are reported to be in talks with Blyk, to acquire it’s advertising message targeting system.
Source: New Media Age
From the release:
Antti Öhrling, UK CEO of Blyk, said, “There won’t be an MVNO when we launch the partnership model. The whole model of engaging is appealing to other operators.”
What Bena thinks:
When I met Blyks strategy officer in Asia last year with Nokia Siemens Networks - going around selling the Blyk concept to Asia operators… I had an inkling. I have said from day one that the advertising-only mobile model is a brilliant idea, but it’s just not ready yet. The fact that Blyk only has 200K customers when it should have hit millions if the offer was a success is a critical factor here. Any mobile business that needs advertisers to work is flawed. Advertisers need volume and if Blyk sells its intelligence now into operators it will succeed. The operators have the audience that brands and agencies relish. Turning the competitive advantage away from a youth or mobile ad brand to an operator tapping into mobile advertising with the chance of a 25% success rate - is the meat.
We wish our warmest regards to Blyk and think the move will be a lot more profitable and successful - as a whole. The company has been extremely innovative and bullish; perhaps also a tad naive… but practice can make perfect.
What Cian thinks:
Along with a lot of other people, I’ll be sad to see Blyk go. It was a brave new idea, and it really homed in on the idea of “inviting advertising in”. Users knew exactly what they were signing up for when they opted-in to Blyk, and Blyk made damn sure to try and send the most relevant possible ads to it’s users. I find it interesting that it’s this part of the Blyk service that operators are looking at: the targeting and ad-delivery system. There’s no mention made of operators looking into the incentives-based model, which is what made consumers interested in that system in the first place. I’m worried that none of the best parts of Blyk will be taken - the parts that opened a genuine conversation with the subscribers.
[...] blinked? There have been reports that Blyk is closing shop, or at least is metamorphosing into a new life, but not as we know it - 200k users is not enough to make it, and its looking at white labelling [...]
I posted a comment a few days ago wondering about Blyk. To me, and this is only my opinion, carrying an extra phone around for 50 free minutes and 50 free texts a month would simply not be worth it. It would be dead weight.
What Blyk needed to do was to make their phone the everyday phone of the youth. By offering such low minutes and texts, this was never the case. It was the extra phone they would use, but not the primary phone. Blyk needed to have the free minutes and free texts for ads, but then a super price plan once those were used up. This would have made them the primary phone. This was a hurdle, in my opinion only, that they could not overcome.
[...] close down its direct-to-consumer business to focus on operator partnerships”. Others such as GoMoNews interpreted this as the closure of the UK service, which runs off Orange’s network, and, with [...]