New UK network touts FREE* mobile broadband The UK's latest mobile operator Samba won't charge punters for its wireless broadband. Instead it will ask customers to watch adverts in exchange for network access. Samba is camping on Three's network and offering almost 7MB of data for every minute of advertising viewed. That's enough for the company to claim 2.5 minutes of …
A five minute advert for a three minute brows.
We will end up with the same thingntheynhave in the US on television, you will wonder when the adverts start and the program finishes.
Also like most adverts on the web we eventually become blind to them and subconsciously ignore them. I can't see this as a long term business proposition.
Personally I'd pay to be advert free.
Ermm, you have to click and I assume the stream being pushed has run to completion before you get your free quota so ad-blocking would negate it, never register any credits for you to claim!
Gaming the system....
Now what you need is an app that streams the ad into the background automatically to build up a nice big stack of credits. So you set up an app to fire off at say 2am while you're asleep, streams enough shitty ads to give you say 50MB of credit to use during the day!
They didn't pick a very googleable word. A search on Google for "samba" comes up with the following
News articles from other news outlets reporting on the same story
Some server software for sharing files on a LAN
Various things to do with Brazilian dancing.
the Society for AMBulatory Anesthesia[sic], whatever that is
Yes, I remember when "Frispies" (free ISPs) started in the US while I was out there for a few years. They worked by "stealing" a 1" banner along the top of your screen which they used to show ads in. Of, course, this was in the days of CRT monitors so a little fiddling with the settings and you could shift the display so this banner was "off-screen".
Yeah great idea by making them watch Internet ads for which you have no control - well thought out that one. How about just stumping up the couple of quid it costs to do it properly.
If people do not watch the ads the advertisers will make no money and quit = service dies. Look didn't even need a crystal ball but it's so obvious.
I definitely don't relish the thought of being forced to sit through an hour and quarter of mind-numbing, soul-destroying advertisements just to get a measly 500MB of wireless data, and I really wonder who would sign up for that.
There are far better deals. On my Three PAYG SIM I get a month's supply of data (up to 2GB) for a fiver. I'd far sooner cough that up than watch ads.
If people are using around 500-600Mb per month (which does not sound unreasonable) - you can get 1 month SIM cards from Three for under £5 each loaded up with 1Gb 'data' - so think I would rather that than have to click / view adverts.
The 3 month SIM cards come with 3Gb and you can get them for less than £15 - so most people should be paying about £5/mo for their mobile broadband. I'd certainly not ar$e around for basically 10-15p a day - time is money.
Have a look on Amazon - type in:
3 Original 1Gb
... the 1Gb (1 month) SIMs are currently £4.50 and the 3Gb (3 month) ones are £11.81 - I'd go with the 3 month one as it ships direct from Amazon themselves (not a marketplace vendor) with free shipping and it's a faff changing the SIM every month.
Back in the day, my friend used an ISP that let you have free Internet (33.6k modem!) so long as you installed their toolbar and clicked on junk that popped up occasionally.
They went bust quite quickly, as did a number of similar offerings. The connection was hideously slow and the adverts just got larger and larger and more annoying. Most customers fled before the company actually died.
Advertising-supported models like that don't really work. A lot of smartphone apps try it but I don't see how the advertisers make their money from it - you can be on Angry Birds Free all day long, it doesn't translate to sales in proportion to the money you have to spend to be there. And the app author really doesn't care because he can offer a £1.99 "no ads" version and make money if his app is any good anyway (so the adverts are really his way to annoy customers into giving HIM money). Sure, you can make money if you hit a big title by accident but who'd have thought Angry Birds would be that successful and who knows what the next title will be?
Now, Google, for example isn't the same - the advertisers spend millions to get on there but they at least have a chance of translating into some money for the bigger companies and Google provide a wealth of tools to target your advertising (even on smartphone, now, I believe). Otherwise, everyone I know who thought they were being a genius and advertising their tiny little 1-man company on Google ads either burned through all their cash in literally minutes with no return or could not measure what the return was (with trackable Internet ads? Come on...) and blindly pumped money into it.
Advertising-funded business is a fickle and dangerous area to stray into, especially without a lot of knowledge of the industry and big players on your books. In this case, your viewers won't convert - you've expressly targeted cheapskates who don't want to buy a contract - even with a phone they already own -which is something that 90% of us have now, or even PAYG, and who are willing to sacrifice a lot of convenience for that "freeness". Just how much do you think they will spend on the adverts that they will be trained to ignore within seconds of using the SIM?
Never target your business at a customer that is going to extremes to NOT spend money with you. Like the ISP who tried to run lots of state-of-the-art complicated and expensive telephony hardware on the basis of you watching ads on your 640x480 screen, you'll go under. The people who are your main base of customers are already determined NOT to spend money, and quite likely to circumvent anything you can put in their way. As such, your income source (the advertisers) will spike and then die off very quickly.
You want to shock me into changing my SIM to your company? Offer me something nobody else does, not add to the existing tripe that everyone already sees too much of and hates. Like, oh, I don't know, decent roaming rates around Europe.
The bulk of my mobile data usage is IMAP email and google[*]maps, with a bit of iMessage thrown in when the signal is good enough. (I work in a building with a metal cage round it for some reason, aesthetics mostly, I suspect, and mobile signal quality inside is atrocious. Curiously, mobile signals from Belgium are often stronger than the FT/Orange ones.) I don't normally look at the web on a phone, mostly because the screen is way, way too small. So this obviously isn't the plan for me...
And I have a practical question: does the advertising count against the data allowance you'e earned?
According to their FAQ watching ads does not come out of your data allowance providing you use a supported browser.
My sim arrived today and the service looks perfect for me. The majority of my tablet usage is on a wifi network but it's nice to have a little free data for use when I'm not in range of a wifi network. A lot of PAYG data seems to expire if not used within a set period. This offering addresses that issue... as long as they're around for.
Back in 1999, while at uni, I signed up with an ISP that not only gave you free access in exchange for watching ads, but actually paid you too. Obviously they didn't last long, but I do remember getting cheques for around £15, equivalent to 15 pints in the union bar back then.
Initially you could just leave it connected and go out for the night, getting paid the whole time. Then they did a software update that required the mouse to be moved every minute or so to get paid. This was shortly followed by some third party software that made the mouse pointer move continuously, and this in turn was followed by their bankruptcy.
How do they get consent for interception/surveillance from BOTH parties to the communication? (per RIPA). Ans; they don't.
How do they get copyright licence for duplicating, processing, and commercially exploiting the content of a [copyright protected] communication? Ans; they don't.
It looks to me like Samba suffers the same problems with the law that were identified by FIPR when they examined Phorm.
Agree with sentiments above, this dog will die.
1) They don't need consent from both parties. I can tape an entire telephone conversation without telling the person the other end. It's just considered polite. And RIPA only affects state investigations conducted across everyone, not singly-identified private individuals signed up to companies they've permitted to do things (or else all Google ads would also fall foul - they are reading my email just the same, and without the other parties explicit consent!).
2) They don't need a copyright licence if their terms of use grant it to them automatically. You used it, you agreed to their T&C's, hope you read them carefully. Same way that the copyright on my Google emails allows them to store them and scan them for viruses and advertising keywords.
So, please, stop talking rubbish until you have a clue what you're talking about.
1) They do need consent from both parties... per the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. You might be able to tape a telephone conversation, your communication service provider cannot without a warrant.
2) They do need a copyright licence, obtained in advance, from the creator of the web site. Commercially exploiting copyright protected works without a licence is a criminal offence.
HTH.
What sort of people want free broadband with such horrible terms. Freeloaders, the unemployed and foreigners. I don't see any of those being lucrative to advertisers. Aside from that, forcing people to watch ads to use broadband is self defeating. People will simply the device upside down, the volume down, develop tools to defeat the advertising, or develop browsing strategies to minimize interference (e.g. open multiple tabs so the advertising tab can be ignored until it is finished). And when that happens an arms race will begin, advertising rates will plummet and the whole scheme will collapse. It's a waste of time.
Remember the X-Stream network? They offered dialup internet on 0800 numbers in return for an ad banner across the top of the screen, of course everyone soon worked out you could kill the banner and the dialup continued, then they changed it... so everyone just took to hiding the banner.
They'd do 'free weekends' where for 48hrs you could get online for nothing and quickly realised that everyone would jump onto their modems bang on midnight and stay there, so they then switched to kicking people every couple of hours.
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