The launch of Samba, an advertising-based, free British broadband service, prompts GigaOM to question if ad-based mobile data can succeed.
Samba targets traveling tablet and laptop users. The customers watch advertisements to gain data credit, which they can use at their convenience. Once users purchase a Samba SIM card, they can get 3G access for free.
“Watch two and a half minutes of adverts in a day — from brands like Volvo, Microsoft and Dell — and you’ve worked up enough credit to cover more than 500MB of data,” notes the post.
Co-founder Ben Atherton explains “With Samba you earn the credit watching ads at a time that is convenient to you and then have access when you need it.”
However, GigaOM argues that ad-supported mobile services have nearly always failed in the past, and most successful ad-supported platforms “aren’t purely ad-supported at all: advertising is just one part of a complex revenue mix.”
The post also notes that ad-supported businesses are most successful when they are platforms such as Facebook and Google. “These are appealing to advertisers because they are self-service, highly-segmented, and targeted. They make money because they scale easily, they don’t necessarily require huge sales teams and they aren’t broadcast mechanisms,” explains GigaOM.
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