100 Mobile Product Ideas...#5...

Operators want to make more money from non-voice services.
Sorry to state the obvious, but it sometimes seems like they don't.

However, let me persevere with trying to come up with suggestions for making more money out of mobile messaging...just one of the sub-themes of my "100 Mobile Product Ideas" series of posts these coming couple of months.

There's money in advertising. Lots of it.
Advertising is undergoing a big change, or so say people like Seth Godin in his interesting book "Purple Cow". You have to ask people for permission to advertise to them. That's a theme from one of his other books too, but I've only read Purple Cow.

The future is ads that speak to individuals, "conversation marketing", "permission marketing", bla-de-bla.

Google's ad-sense speaks to individuals. You can see the Google ads on the right of this page. If everything's working, they should be advertising stuff to do with the content in this page. I'm not sure how it works really. I used the acronym "RF*D" once (* = "I") and ever since then, the ads are all about RF*D. Does that mean people are coming to my site from searchs on RF*D? Nevermind.

The really interesting point is that Google's advertising revenue was 1 BILLION dollars for the last few months (read about it on the BBC).
That's a lot of money.
That's a lot of new-wave "individual consumer targetted" ad money.

I'm rambling here, so let me get to it.
Mobile operators should be getting in on the advertising act.

How?
I shall tell you how in the next post, but first you need to read this from my old blog (or pages 412-417 of my book for a more up-to-date explanation).