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Originally posted by gonzo@Nov 18 2003, 01:02 AM
Goddamn Hellpuppy!
We spent that 100K last year reseaching prepaid and online buying habits in the wrong damn place!!
Why didnt you suggest coming to Oprano and giving it to Carrie?
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Oh man, this is a huge can of worms to get into this late. Already past my bedtime, but I cant resist....
When you work IN porn behind the scenes your perspectives of how the "normals" feel and perceive things gets skewed. The pie is still growing as we are still gaining Internet newbies, but the growth has flattened considerably. More and more our business is coming from a pool of surfers that is getting re-used over and over.
The big untapped oil well is with the surfers who cant or wont use a credit card online. I'm not going to give a free marketing lesson here, but if you use your head, you'll realize that there's a huge percentage of people out there who wont pay for ANYTHING and think the internet and everything on it should be free. There's an additional percentage who buy online but absolutely will not pay for porn. There are users out there who are paranoid to give up their credit card number online, there are others who just dont want to risk having their name in a porn site's database or their wife finding the bill.
Bottom line, many people aren't comfortable buying porn. Add another layer of anonymity and security and you grow the pie much more than what you can do with the current cards.
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CJ they are programming my Tmobile gear like you described as we speak.
The cell phone technology aint that far behind. The billing system is!
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And I have all the features she mentions on my phone, and I've had it for over a year. My phone will roam just fine around the world as well. However, she's exactly right, in general the U.S. is way behind in wireless phone infrastructure and technology. Some of the big carriers here including AT&T and Cingular are only in recent months beginning to offer GSM based phones.
The U.S. is also different culturally from the rest of the world in terms of usage of our phones particularly with the teens. A u.s. teen typically has their own room, their own computer and broadband. If they wanna IM with their friends, why the hell would they do it via cellphone?
In Europe, different story, many do not have those type luxuries, and they also spend a lot of time on mass transit or waiting on mass transit. Wanna chat with your friends via IM as teens are prone to do? They do it with their phones. They're also more likely to use the phones for online games, etc.
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If I could bill it Id funnel all that Ozzie traffic to SMS for payment on sites
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SMS is already used in a lot of micropayment type situations in the rest of the world for sure. The U.S. is more finicky. I dont think it'll fly here in it's current form, but it could be made to work if instead of strictly being a phone company transaction it could be used as a secured way to transmit a configurable payment method to any payer....similar to the way online billpayment with pay anyone technology works.
Visa and MC are holding a lot of this back, they like things the way they are right now. There have been many technologies such as smartcards with modem readers and keyboards with credit swipe mechanisms which Visa and MC have killed by intentionally letting them die on the vine.