Cingular Wants Mobile Ads. So What?
Katie over at GigaOM lets us know that Cingular now wants to put ads on their “deck” as well and how it’s unlikely they will offer free or discounted services in exchange for this. Oh yeah, Verizon wants to do it too. Can someone explain to me why I should care about this?
Those of us in the technology industry tend to forget how real people use their mobile phones. They use it to–get this–make and receive phone calls. They may use it to send and receive text messages. This data stuff? Don’t use it, don’t care. Those people won’t notice that there are ads all over the carrier’s homepage on the mobile phone or other pages. They may not even know they have a web browser or think, rightfully so, that the carriers charge too damn much money for these features.
The people I know that do use the carriers data services–and I don’t personally know many that do–are smart enough to steer clear of the carriers “walled garden.” The carriers may make some extra money doing this, but that’s their job. Maximize the amount of money they can make with a given resource. If the carriers want to throw an ad or two on their deck, fine by me. I won’t see it.
Now when they start doing pre-roll ads on my phone calls or interrupt my calls with ads, then I have a problem.
