Mobile/Cell phone content

Does anyone here provide content for mobile phone content providers.

I am in the process of licensing some content of mine for a mobile phone content provider in France and would like to hear of anyone's experiences.

I guess, like with AOL in the earlier days of the internet, that mobile phone content providers seem to want to offer portals of closed content available on a paid for basis, Europe seems to be ahead of the US in this area as well with mobile phones advancing and users demanding better quality content readily available such as news, tv, sport, galleries. It certainly looks to be a worthwhile venture as the ringtone/screensaver model has been proven and now the content is ready to evolve to better quality galleries, clips, news etc on demand and the ability to sell my content many times over without any further input looks interesting.

The content provider I am in negotiation with already have a proven track record in France and are rolling out to Holland, Belgium, UK. by providing content for Orange, SFR, O2 etc on different networks.

It may be something that many of you out there have not looked to tap into yet but the userbase is there and the technology is there, it certainly looks to be a platform that can offer immediate income streams for existing content if you have suitable material for licensing.

 

I had a WAP site back in 98 where I kept the league table of our football team.

Last year I quickly skimmed some industry reports again on the topic but the main problem was accepting micropayments. If you just license your content to someone this won't be your problem but for webmasters on their own who want some exclusive paid for content, getting paid was the issue back then.

What are the options now? How can you charge like 5p for access? If you are big enough you can obviously let them pre-pay and then subtract it out of their balance but for small time publishers that's not an option.

 

I would only be licensing so keeps it simple at my end, which therefore means less potential income but I am happy to slide into the market on the back of someone more experienced, only licensing for France just now and I'll report back on how they do things and how successful it is in the coming months.

I'll do some more research on their competitors and the whole business model as well.

 

How does it work? Do they pay you a flat fee or 'performance based' by impressions or leads or whatever? Just curious.

 

sji2671, I am in the same position as you are, I'm thinking to provide original content for mobile phones.

I am a affiliate of Media plazza and I know that they have an option to provide your content. I've read the licence agrement and it's ok from my point of view but I do not have a clue about the royalty fees.

Did you happen to know anything about that?

 

I get 10% of the revenue which is low, but 'seemingly' standard.
I am supplying an image gallery to them and just need to zip them the images and they add it to their portal. It's zero risk for me as the images are small and my artists have agreed to let me license the artwork so I just share any revenue with them, it's a bit of a test for me, the company already have 10 content providers and offer 40 services, I can't disclose any other info on them just now but they do the selling etc so it's something I am prepared to try out.

 

10% is not bad.
As much as I know, about 50% goes to the mobile carrier (orange, vodaphone...). From the rest they must pay the affiliate, take their share, pay some fee to copyright associations (in my country at least)... and our share