Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 02 January 2008 05:47
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
An Australian company going by the rather suggestive name of 'Fluc' is offering cellphone customers hard cash if they are willing to receive ads relevant to them, their locations and their friends. Mobile advertising is going to be big, but not, I suspect, this way.
Fluc has been running for several months. My first encounter with it was an email from a total stranger saying: "Fluc is a new way to monetise your mobile phone by getting paid for receiving mobile messages about things relevant to your interests and more importantly – your location! It's entirely free to join and better yet – you can score all sorts of coupons, discount, offers and promotions - plus you get paid for receiving them! You control the amount of messages your receive, what they're about, where they come from and even what time of the day you want to receive them!"
Sounds good, but the $64,000 question is: how much will I earn by accepting Fluc ads? And that is the one question that the
Fluc website significantly fails to answer, even with a ballpark figure. However according to one blog site, the fee is around 20 cents per ad.
In a posting responding to these and other blog comments, Fluc founder Tim Davis said: "...the amount you receive per ad is auction based, so this can vary entirely depending on whether you receive SMS, MMS or WAP Push etc." He also explained that Fluc targets individuals "using the aggregated data a user enters when signing up to our service in combination with their location...We target users entirely on the amount of information they provide us with."
Davis also responded to criticisms that the company's name was a bad choice by saying: 'They also said [fashion label] 'FCUK' was a bad idea. Look what happened to them." Point taken.
Fluc claims to be "currently self-funded [with] the support of our family and friends." Notwithstanding its small beginnings, its ambitions are global. It claims to have access to over 700 mobile networks worldwide, and any person who has access to any one of these networks can join [and] receive ads."
