Things are about to get very interesting for mobile content purchases. A Paris-based company that has 10 years experience in digital content has today announced a major launch. Hi-media is opening an office in San Francisco for its micropayments system, Allopass. Let’s have a look!
What’s the deal?
Hi-media combines several very interesting propositions, which I’m going to go through one-by-one.
1) Digital media – Hi-media is a digital content publisher. Starting in 2000, it made a business out of moving content from one place to another on the internet. This includes games, songs, pictures, news stories – whatever you like. If you have digital content, Hi-media can help you push it far and wide. It operates in 9 European countries, the USA and Brazil. It employs more than 500 people and reported over €172.1 million euros in sales in 2009 – an increase of 27% over 2008.
2) Micropayments – through it’s subsidiary Allopass, Hi-media has been using micropayments to monetise digital content in over 60 countries. It has a genuinely comprehensive selection of payment options. You can pay via online checkouts; mobile, home phone or internet billing; premium SMS; credit and debit cards; prepaid cards; or an Allopass electronic wallet. Allopass currently handles over 8 million transactions per month.
3) Digital advertising – micropayments is just one way Hi-media monetises its content. It also provides on-line and mobile advertising services through its Hi-media Advertising network, which has been running for 12 years.
I spoke to Pooj Preena, CEO of Hi-media USA, who gave me an example of one way that GoMo News could use Allopass. If, for example, we wanted to charge for reading our articles (We don’t! Don’t worry!), Allopass would be able to handle the entire process for us. It would set up a payment firewall – this would allow consumers to see a brief sample of the article before deciding whether or not they wanted to make a small payment to see the rest. And that payment could be handled in any of the methods outlined above. The interesting thing is that kind of payment would take 60 or more days to process usually… which leads me on to the fourth proposition from Hi-media:
4) Deep pockets – Hi-media has been around for 10 years, and it has made a fair whack of money in that time. As a result, it can afford to take risks that other micropayments providers can’t. When a merchant (or a small website) makes a sale through micropayments, Allopass will forward them on that money immediately. In most cases it take 60 or more days for those payments to be processed, which is a long time to wait for a small business. Allopass can afford to forward on that money immediately, and wait the 60 days to be reimbursed by the bank/operator that is handling the payment.
What we think?
I termed this a “mobile content” matter above, but that’s not strictly accurate. Hi-media and Allopass are much bigger than that – it’s a full digital content offering. It combines mobile and on-line content and monetisation into a single bundle that can be used by small and large content providers, digital merchants and brand advertisers.
That’s pretty hot.
As Pooj Preena explained to me, Hi-media has been a silent partner for about 10 years now – but digital content is really coming to the fore of late. And now is the time for this company with deep roots to start making big publicity plays. I would say we’ll be seeing and hearing a lot from this company in the near future.
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