May 14, 2006
Excuse me, Sir
Took the express train in from Arlanda airport to Stockholm today. Couldn’t help but notice the on-train TV station with ads, and the seat-back ad for Nokia:
Despite the fare being even more expensive than the Heathrow Express (the most per mile of any public train service), they’re building a “two sided” business model, just like (for example) magazines. They aren’t willing to settle for just the ticket revenue. Indeed, the SAS flight over had stickered ads on the back of the tray tables. (My kids will just love peeling those off, so I hope the glue is good to keep them amused for a while.)
What’s interesting is how there are two kinds of attention-based business model out there. You could call them “voluntary” and “involuntary”. With the former, you go seek out the media, and the ads are likely to be value-generating part of the experience. Most magazines are in this category, particularly hobbyist, lifestyle and technology ones. At the other extreme you have “involuntary” ads, which you’re willing to put up with as they are incidental to some other much bigger and unrelated transaction. (Movie theatres are probably somewhere in the middle, which explains their business model muddle.)
Now, can you spot an industry that’s busy putting billions of weeny screens in people’s pockets, and has a distinctly one-sided revenue model? Hint: it begins with a ‘t’.
Yup, telcos are proud that they are able to sell you wallpaper to fill that space and cover up the lack of imagination in placing information of mutual benefit to the user and operator. What’s that smell? Hmmm, reminds me of ‘opportunity’.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 06:13 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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