mGinger – advertising comes to mobile phones

mGinger is an innovative way for advertisers to reach their customers through mobile phones. Before you say “oh no, not ads in my mobile too”, listen to this, they actually pay you to receive ads in your mobile. Here’s how it works

1. You sign up with them providing your mobile number and specifying your interests – the list is quite comprehensive, including books, apparels, computers, sports, travel etc (check the screen shot below).
2. You specify how many ads you would like to receive per day (maximum 10) and at what time you would like to receive them.
3. They pay you 20 paise for every ad you receive and read.

They also have a referral program and this is where it gets more interesting. If you refer your friends, you get paid 10 paise for every ad they read and 5 paise for every ad their friends (your friends’ friends) read. They are in beta now, signing up people to receive ads. Launch date hasn’t been mentioned in the site, the FAQ says “Advertisers would get interested to send ads out to you only when they find significant number of people on the network”. They’re in the process of building the network. Its a good idea (at least on paper), we have to applaud them for coming up with such a simple and neat idea. That said, I’m wondering what kind of numbers (number of people in the network reading ads) they’ll need to attract big advertisers. Advertisers won’t be interested in a few hundreds or few thousands of people, they’ll expect big numbers before they open up their marketing budgets. The website design is clean and its very easy to navigate the site. You can easily keep track of your earnings and referrals. There’s a calculator right on the home page which you can use to estimate how much money you can make. Why it might work:

• Almost everyone and his dog has mobile phone these days, so the market is huge.
• If you receive 10 ads per day, its Rs.60 per month. You can dismiss it as a joke, but if you refer 10 of your friends and each one in turn refers five of his/her friends, you make Rs.1,110 per month (check the screen shot below). Now, that is some money, right? So it shouldn’t be too difficult for them to build a sizable network in a few months.
  

• The user has full control of what ads (s)he would like to receive, how many and at what time. This is less intrusive than those irritating TV ads which are everywhere, all the time. Also, you can change preferences and even cancel the service, at any time.
• Since the user chooses what ads (s)he would like to receive, its better targeted than other media.
• It is difficult to accurately measure the reach of television and print ads, all we have is the circulation and subscription numbers. mGinger, on the other hand, can generate detailed reports based on demographics, gender, age, education, salary etc. This information is gold, as far as the advertisers are concerned.

What could be the challenges:

• How can mGinger make sure that I actually read my ads?
• It might be fun at the beginning, but people might soon get tired of receiving ten ads a day. Keeping up the interest level might be a challenge.

Some suggestions:

• I think they’re planning to send out only text ads at this time. These days lots of mobile phones support flash, how about collecting handset information during sign up and sending flash ads, just to make the process of reading ads more interesting?
• How about giving incentives like games, ring tones etc? something like for every 50 ads I read, I’ll be eligible for receiving a free ring tone or a game.
• They could directly sign up with mobile operators and offer free SMS or talktime – something like for every 50 ads I read, I receive 5 minutes of free talk time or something similar (instead of cash?).
• If they can strike “exclusive” deals with local shops (city specific – like big bazaar in bangalore, for example), that would be a great hook to draw more users.

Overall, I think its a good idea. I’m just curious to see how well mGinger does. You can sign up here (as my friend) or you can directly sign up here.

A look at two “digg” style Indian sites

Recently I came across two delightfully named “digg” style Indian sites – DealMaadi and TechPakoda. Lets have a look at them.

DealMaadi:

DealMaadi helps shoppers to find the best deals across various cities in India. Registration is free and you can post deals and vote on the best deals once you become a member. The category list is exhaustive, including cameras, laptops, jewelry, software, travel etc. The site is very easy to understand and navigate. Looks like they check every deal submitted, as there is a “unpublished” tab and the FAQ says

“We check every posted deal to avoid such situations. Since to err is human, please flag us here and we will act to ensure only the clean and genuine deals are part of the system.”

which is good to know and explains why I didn’t see any spam on the site (frankly, I expected to see some). Though the idea itself is not original, it is smart of Rajiv Renganathan (who created the site) to apply it to a very niche and useful topic – shopping. We all like to save some cash while shopping, so the site should see some good traffic.

And yes, the site has the regular features – RSS feeds (for popular, new and all deals), tag clouds etc. I couldn’t see any ads at the site, but I assume that would be the way to monetize it in future.

Some suggestions:

1. How about adding “Expiry date” when submitting deals? (obviously they won’t show up on the site after they expire)

2. City specific RSS feeds, at least for the metros?

Its a very useful site. Have a look, and happy shopping

TechPakoda:

Thats an interesting name

TechPakoda is for Indian techies, aggregating news primarily on the tech scene in India. There is nothing new to say about how the site works, it is similar to Digg and DealMaadi. While browsing through the first few pages of the popular stories section, most (not all) of the stories submitted were relevant. Thats good because the site depends on its users to flag irrelevant content.

Most of the links in the “Most Voted” page were good reads and I spent a good deal of time going through them. You can put JavaScript code in your blog (or site) and allow your users to directly submit links to TP. I couldn’t figure out the difference between “Latest News” and “Upcoming News”. There are huge banner ads and also Adsense, so their monetization strategy is clear.

Digg style sites for niche topics is a good idea, as they are more relevant than a site trying to cater to all subjects. Reminds me of that excellent site DZone.