Service providers are mobile’s piggies-in-the-middle
Rating: All the liability for the least revenue
The service providers are stuck in the middle, getting all the stick and not much of the profit is the message I came away with after chatting with Sally Weatherall, a spokesperson for AIM (Association for Interactive Media and Entertainment), the industry trade body.
Those getting off lightly include the mobile network operators, the newspaper groups and the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority).
This chat stemmed from my recent tirades against PhonePayPlus (PPP). Weatherall argues that the PPP is being treated as an “outsourced resource for customer complaints” by the network operators. Got a complaint about content? – then call the PPP, is the operator’s attitude.
Which is all well and good until you look at who’s getting all the revenue. Out of a £1.50 Premium Rate text, the service operator takes around four to six pence. The content provider gets around 90 pence and the rest goes to the network operator. Yet who gets the fines? – Yes, it’s the service providers.
Weatherall agrees with me that the ASA ought to be dragged into much greater involvement. If you received an SMS that read, “Download your NO CHARGE Mark Ronson Valerie Ringtone now”, you’d think it was a promotion. Not an acceptance for a £4.50 per week subscription as it actually proved to be.
Think what damage this has done for potential record label mobile advertising. Consumers simply won’t believe that mobile music content is ever really free and simply ignore any such promotion. So the ASA ought to be brought in to ensure that all adverts placed in the back of newspapers like The Sport conform to a strict code, for example.
However, the responsibility for ensuring that content providers don’t use premium rate telephone numbers for their helpdesk lines does lie with the PPP, Weatherall suggested. Not the service provider.
The present situation is akin to receiving an unsolicited parcel and then asking the recipient to pay 50 pence to send it back in order to get their £1.50 refund. Then fining the Royal Mail for accepting the unsolicited parcels in the first place. It’s just madness.
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