techdigest

A new website has come out of stealth mode: mginger.com. It offers a feature that many have been thinking about.. get paid for the advertisements on your cellphone. The website mentions the following points -

• Earn money for reading ads on your mobile
• Get SMS ads of only those products that you want to buy
• Get ads at your convenience
• Save money through discount coupons and offers
• Earn much more money by inviting family and friends

I would like to see how long this model goes and how does and how it translates into revenues for the advertisers. I am sure that very soon, the users will figure out the categories to make much more money and add those advertisement categories even if they do not want to buy those items! Perhaps one more wrong solution to fix the wrong problem?

Update:
When you sign-up, the email verification mail goes to the spam folder if you are using gmail. No no.. I have not signed up.. this is just my gut feeling

Update 2: Thanks to Himanshu for bringing my attention to mGinger terms. Here are the important ones -

• You MUST provide correct/true information about your profile. mGinger has the right to verify the information you provide. If this information changes you must immediately update your profile by logging in to mGinger.com
• You MUST read the advertisements sent to you.

Now you might think, how would they make sure that I do “read” every advertisement? Here comes the biggie -

• mGinger will send verification messages called “Activity Verification SMS” (referred to as AVS in this document) from time to time to check if you are reading the advertisements sent to you. You MUST respond to these AVSs with the appropriate message content which is specified in the verification message. If you don’t, mGinger reserves the right to downgrade your membership by lowering your payouts and eventually terminate your membership.

This is total crap to me. To make 20 paisa, I not only need to get some bugging SMS, I need to reply messages with products/services that I have no interest in buying! In my humble opinion, for any advertisement model to succeed, it needs to be unobtrusive to the end user. This model will be a failure for the advertisers who will not be able to realize their investment in this scheme. If it succeeds, I will learn few things about people that I dont know. Till then, I will hold on to my opinion of “Good intent, bad implementation” for mGinger!

This entry was posted Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under Mobile, Advertising. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.