The pendulum swings back to “paid for” content

It looks like the swing towards “ad funded everything” is quickly coming to an end, and there is a trend back in the direction of selling products and services to users.

“Ad funded” for many businesses really meant “shareholder funded in the hope of later monetization”. Meanwhile, people actually selling things were ignored – that was thought too “dirty” or “difficult”. However, in difficult economic conditions, remember the Yorkshire expression: “where there’s muck there’s brass”.

Apple iPhone Software Store generating sales

According to Apple, sales of software in the iPhone App store were $30 million in July.
“This thing’s going to crest at half a billion, soon,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal: iPhone Software Sales take off. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1bn marketplace at some point in time. I’ve never seen anything like [...]

Hassle: Portuguese Taxes

Here’s another “single market” one:
Bango deals with three mobile operators in Portugal.  Each of them requires various documentation, in physical form, with the appropriate notarization, stamping, and authentication by local tax offices, before they can remit funds outside Portugal – to avoid double taxation.  In addition they require various VAT documentation and clearances. 

Hassle watch

Acting for thousands of content providers, collecting payments from over 100 countries through many different payment channels gives Bango a great view into the byzantine complexities of tax and financial laws around the world.  We are going to start blogging some of the hassle we encounter, ranging from odd local practices to mobile carriers who [...]

“Revenue Leakage and” “Breakage Bonusses”

I recently read an interesting article about Revenue leakage over at MocoNews: http://www.moconews.net/entry/419-vodafone-fesses-up-on-faulty-reporting-content-companies-setting-up-own/
There are definitely inaccuracies in reporting, but it goes both ways:
A major carrier has outages in its billing system from time to time – usually no more than a few minutes.  When this happens, off-deck connectors into the billing system can’t collect money, [...]