Turkcell, the largest mobile operator in Turkey, believes that in the future you will be charged for only one service by your operator – data. With VoIP becoming more and more popular as the channel for voice calls, and IM and mobile email catching up on SMS, Turkcell is exploring the possibilities of ad-funded services. The idea being, in the long run, that all services could be data-based, and they could all be heavily ad-supported.
Turkcell, which has 37 million subscribers, today said that it’s recent mobile marketing campaigns had been going very well. It reported good returns and response rates.
From the release:
In an interview with MobiAd News Cenk Serdar, Chief Value Added Services Officer at Turkcell said “In the long run, customers are not going to be paying for voice separately – it’s all going to be a data package and voice will be included. And actually, the next step beyond that will probably be that the data charges will also be paid by someone else (e.g. paid by a brand through advertising).”
Source: http://www.mobiadnews.com/?p=3558
What we think?
This is a really interesting thing for an operator to be considering. In the past few weeks we’ve seen mobile carriers go from bull-headed oppostition to VoIP services to a much more co-operative stance. It’s like everyone can see where the winning bet should go. VoIP just works, and you can’t really stop people using it. The question is whether the operators will try to create a profit-sharing atmosphere with VoIP as early as possible, or try to wring as much money out of their current systems before the popularity of VoIP forces them to capitulate. It’ll be interesting to see where Turkcell goes with this, and whether there will be anything that European operators can learn from it.
