One of the fastest evolving areas of adult entertainment, where new technological innovations and emerging markets are creating significant profit potential, is in the realm of mobile chat and live cams. Tapping into these revenue streams opens up new ways to monetize content and extend your brand beyond the traditional methods of making money that your brand has already optimized. The Affil4You team has a lot of experience managing these mobile offerings we are providing these 5 keys along with some details for anyone else moving forward into these markets.
Mobile Live Cam and Live Chat Billing
Successful mobile webcam and chat companies implement an entirely new set of price points and billing options separate from other types of subscription based offers.
There are some foundational differences between mobile billing for these kinds of services and the traditional desktop versions of similar offerings. With cams and chat, mobile customers are typically paying a per minute or per message fee as opposed to any weekly or monthly subscription based pricing. That brings to mind many tactical decisions that need to be made about price points, retention methods and up-sell possibilities since the overall rates of recurring customer relationships will tend to be lower than traditional content portals, while the frequency of impulse purchasing can be substantially higher.
Successful mobile webcam and chat companies implement an entirely new set of price points and billing options separate from other types of subscription based offers.
Mobile Live Cam and Live Chat Technical Considerations
Beyond billing, selling these products across many mobile platforms adds an additional level of complexity from a technical perspective as well. For webcam businesses, one primary consideration is the vast and frequently changing universe of different types of mobile devices on the market. There needs to be several ways to be able to serve up the webcam content to satisfy customers whether they choose to use an iPhone, iPad, or any one of dozens of significantly different android devices. Provide cross-platform support for users who also want to enjoy the same great content with a desktop screen and an interface that remains intuitive on each device makes finding a good global solution to suit them all very difficult. Developing such a flexible platform in-house can be a significant cost concern in terms of financial and human resources.
The best mobile companies provide a platform that can manage chat services and webcams for each country where they might be offered while accommodating multiple languages and overcoming potential device compatibility challenges.
Mobile Live Cam and Live Chat Markets
Traditional web based marketing has always included the aspect of geo-targeting offers to the specific markets most willing to accept them. For mobile webcams and chat, that same notion remains true but becomes exceptionally more important because of many legal restrictions, carrier policies, cultural preferences and economic considerations.
Identifying which markets are likely to be the most lucrative or fastest emerging for your specific offerings is an essential aspect of reaching profitability quickly, and then sustaining it for a long duration.
The answer for your specific offerings will vary depending on billing capabilities and regulations, but as it stands now, a few of the biggest markets for adult mobile billing overall would be Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. We are also seeing substantial recent growth in some Eastern European regions and particular South American cities. Making matters more complicated, the speed with which trends ebb and flow in the mobile arena is much faster and more fleeting than what some adult companies have become accustomed to over the years.
Economies, carrier regulations, cultural shifts and increased market competition can reshape a mobile market in a matter of months, as compared to the magazine days of adult content when things stayed relatively static for years at a time.
Mobile Live Cam and Live Chat Hardware Platforms
Too many business owners are trying to determine which hardware platform will become dominant on a global scale, which is an exercise in futility once you take into account how many billions of dollars are being pumped into the hardware wars by the wealthiest companies in the world.
Fortunately there is a much more important question that is also somewhat easier to answer. Your products will be targeted to specific countries, regions and cities, so what matters most isn’t which device is dominant globally, but which device has become the most popular where you potential clients exist.
Drilling down into the data, you’ll find that in most countries where smartphones are widely used, the Android devices tend to be more dominant among mobile adult customers since they have fewer video and streaming limitations than other devices like the iPhone.
However, in other countries like South Africa or India, where most users are still using older handsets it becomes most profitable to afford them the option to download video rather than stream it since many of those older devices and customer pools lack Wi-Fi capabilities. Fortunately the rapid growth of HTML5 is making hardware less of an issue as modern devices move toward industry standardization at the content level.
Mobile Live Cam and Live Chat is it Worth Doing?
Live cams, chat and SMS services represent a fairly large part of the mobile market, but perhaps not nearly as much as many people might think. Users of mobile devices behave differently than users on desktops, especially when it comes to cams and chat services.
Desktop users retain longer than mobile users, in large part because of fundamental components of the desktop viewing experience like screen size and interface scalability. While the mobile markets for these kinds of products do continue to gain momentum and there are significant dollars to be made, many start-ups find that the considerable head-winds caused by stringent regulation and the complexity of going local on a global scale make it much more challenging than they originally expected.
Affil4You is a full-service mobile monetization mechanism for companies to connect with in order to optimize your mobile content offerings. For more information visit Affil4you.com or contact sales@affil4you.com.
