The New Blyk

An interesting chat just now at the Wireless World Forum mobileYouth Trends Workout with Jonathan MacDonald, Head of Sales at ad-funded network Blyk. He told me that the company will have 12-13,000 customers signed up by the end of the year, and 100,000 within a year of the network's launch, (not 10 months as stated in the original story), which means by the end of September 2008.
While these numbers may not sound earth-shattering, MacDonald made the point that the company could grow the network much more quickly by simply handing out free accounts to all and sundry (providing they are in the 16-24 age group), but that it is sticking to its invitation-only policy.
When I made the point that this amount of users, even less when you take the segmentation capabilities on which Blyk prides itself into account, did not seem enough to attract the interest of some of the global brands that are advertising with Blyk, MacDonald pointed out that, in fact, the numbers stood up well against, say, an online ad campaign reaching 1 million unique users, with a clickthrough rate of 0.2%.
Blyk customers receive a basic rate of 217 free texts and 43 free minutes of voice calls each month in return for looking at, on average, between one and two advertising messages each day. If ad sales are up, customers get more texts and talk time, and if they run out of free time, customers can buy more.
There was a good deal of scepticism from some students attending the event who had not heard of Blyk before, but MacDonald was in ebullient mood, claiming that users love the service, and hinting that the grey market could be the next the company has its sights on.
Whatever Blyk does next, one thing is for sure: the traditional network operators will be watching with extreme interest.

David Murphy
Editor