Blyk goes Dutch
31 January 2008
Blyk goes Dutch
Advertising funded virtual mobile network Blyk announced its first expansion on Wednesday, with a move into the Netherlands.
Blyk will use Vodafone Netherlands as its host operator, pitching services at the 16-24 year old age range.
The company launched services in the UK in September, targeting an audience of 4.5 million young consumers. At the time the MVNO said it is concentrating on a strategy that it "90 per cent familiar and 10 per cent different". Subscribers receive 40 minutes and 270 SMS message free of charge per month - no contract, no bill.
Blyk did not say whether Dutch subscribers would get a similar deal, but more details will be released when the service goes live in the second half of this year.
Blyk users in the UK receive up to six adverts a day, typically in the form of an MMS. These MMSes are crafted so as to be interactive, thereby allowing the advertiser to add further granularity to its user profile by asking about preferences. Blyk expects the interactive element to be a success because it costs the user nothing to respond.
The concept evidently holds some interest for investors. Blyk also announced funding from Goldman Sachs and Industrial and Financial Investments Company (IFIC).
Some are still sceptical, however. Earlier this month, telecoms.com met with mobile advertising specialist Mobixell, which believes that operators can't get away with ad sponsoring on call services or SMS, "because these are already successful services."
Instead, Yehuda Elmaliach, CTO of Mobixell, believes that operators are better off targeting web services by putting ads in Instant Messaging applications for example. Elmaliach also reckons that network operators, while clued up, are also apprehensive about mobile advertising. "They have all this information about there users but it's spread all over, in various CRM tools. The operators need someone to come in and aggregate that data so it can be properly targeted and give the best user experience," he said.
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