Om Malik’s Broadband Blog - For mobile carriers, moblogs mean cash money

Link: Om Malik’s Broadband Blog - For mobile carriers, moblogs mean cash money.

Business 2.0: While users seem to love the ability to post pix on the fly, the real beneficiaries will be carriers, who’ve been looking for ways to plump up their flat revenues-per-customer. Here’s why. Everyone expected camera phones to unleash a flood of photo sharing and, with it, growing demand for bandwidth. But that didn’t happen because sharing pictures with your cell phone is a real pain in the neck: Uploading them is awkward and often doesn’t work. But moblogging relies on technology that makes it a snap: Sign on with a moblog service like Flickr and start e-mailing photos from your phone to that account.

Thanks, Om, for stating this. Maybe now they will listen.

But, here's an exercise: Go to the operators and talk about posting pics directly (over IP) from the phone. I bet you can't find one who will not, at first, complain about MMS cannibalization. Fortunately, most of them come around (some sooner, some later) and are willing, reluctantly, to give it a try. Then their next comment is how to get money off each posting, not being satisfied with 'just' traffic. Then they try to figure out how to lock in their customers with their own (home-grown and weak) blog service.

Sheesh.

I tell them always:

• You'll get more traffic revenue than with MMS.
• Be open and users will love you. Lock people in and you get nothing.
• Ban other blog services with IP-blocking and users will complain and go elsewhere.
• Try to charge per posting and you'll kill the whole thing.