>Eeek...I wouldn't use this service for a fee, so I definitely don't see >that many other people doing so. But if it were *free*, I'd use it at >least 5 times per day. In this particular instance though, each click >might cost me (as in, The Company) between 5 and 10p. So I'd need to >find a revenue for each click that, given the expected volume of clicks >would make me more than 5 to 10p each time.
a cost to you of between 5p and 10p a click is fairly expensive. most services ive dealt with that have (and this was a long time ago) generated revenue from "click throughs" were paying 10p per hundred clicks. one way to do it is the approach that a lot of "useful" services are using - offer a few clicks per day/week/$time for free and then charging a premium for more. 192 and bt do this for their phone/address lookups. then its just a case of finding a nice cheap easy way for charging micropayments for clicks. a reverse sms/0898 number can give you "credits". im working on a proposal for a large tv company to allow sms's to appear on screen at a cost of 1 euro for 5 sms's. then a loyalty scheme/incentive to encourage people to keep on registering for more credits and getting a discount as a result. i have a fairly good micropayment system working at the moment, the idea being that most services put such expensive costs on services that it discourages people from trying and seeing if they like it. text messages are a symptom of this thought. at an average price of 10 pence per message its actually a very expensive method of communication, if the cost was reduced to 5 pence per message im sure the profit would increase as the number of messages would go up to such an extent that the higher profit margin would be negated. its a fairly common idea that lowering the price can increase the profit, but only supermarkets seem to have cottoned on to the idea. for instance, the music industry seems to be stuck with the mentality that higher prices = more profit, even though sales are falling. 3g mobile networks will shoot themselves in the foot if the pricing of text messaging doesnt drop significantly - because why do i want to pay 40p for sending 50k of data (a picture with orange), when i am currently paying 10p to send 160 bytes of text. t-mobile are charging 20 quid per month and give you an allowance of 10 meg of pictures allowed to be sent that month. duncan
