Dialer Market Shrinks, Goodthinxx Pares Back

VIENNA, Austria – With significant shrinkage occurring in the dialer market, Goodthinxx has made recent changes to its business model that have resulted in a great deal of webmaster speculation and board talk. However, according to Goodthinxx CEO, Tanja Rahman, her company is going strong and has downsized its staff in order to stay healthy.

"Goodthinxx.com is doing very fine," Rahman told XBiz. "What we did in the last month to be more profitable is we cut down our immense overhead and costs. We are now a smaller team again, now 15 people instead of 30 people, which is totally nice, and we reduced our advertising budget."

As part of its downsizing, Goodthinxx will be canceling its U.S.-based tradeshow presence and will instead focus on being present at the six international shows that take place yearly.

Ever since major changes began to occur in the online credit card processing landscape, including stricter chargeback regulations put in place by Visa and Mastercard and the withdrawal of American Express and PayPal from the adult market, alternative billing has been given a more significant slice of the billing market than ever before.

But on the downside, the dialer market – which relies on a piece of software placed in the customer’s computer that begins billing the phone bill on a per-minute basis until the user logs off – has also been wrought with controversy.

Goodthinxx, which also runs an affiliate program called Goodthinxxcash and derives about 80 percent of its business from mainstream companies, has labored under the accusation that its payment process is flawed. Although Rahman claims that the trouble has always been with telephone carriers and their reluctance to pay dialer companies because of the sheer abundance of end-user complaints that typically don't get resolved until complaints have been investigated. Goodthinxx has also transitioned to a payment cycle that only pays webmaster payouts after 500 euros or more have been accrued.

"The dialer market is shrinking, absolutely," Rahman told XBiz. "In Switzerland it's forbidden, Spain and Austria are only opt-in, and in Germany and the United Kingdom there is significantly reduced demand."

In response to those changes, Goodthinxx has ramped up its Voice Call service as an alternative to dialers. Voice Call is a service that has been in the making for the past four years, and which the company believes offers a safer solution for consumers and a more guaranteed payment method for webmasters.

According to Goodthinxx, the surfer calls the premium rate number listed on the website, receives a code, enters the code on the phone and gets billed via phone. The user has to stay connected to the call for the duration of the time spent surfing the website or he/she loses access. Due to regulations in each of the particular countries, calls automatically terminate after a specified time, although users then have the option to opt-in again and continue viewing content.

In other news, Goodthinxx lost its previous data traffic carrier Liechtenstein, which no longer allows data traffic to terminate into its network.

According to Rahman, "Goodthinxxcash.com is not affected by this and can still use this solution to make money from over 236 countries with our Voice Call solution."

The company claims to have updated all existing dialer links with its back up global number and has exchanged the former Liechtenstein dialer number with an alternative that is accessible worldwide.