No confusion here, Rafat. I’m not sure whether you missed them or chose to ignore, but the piece cites a couple of hard figures regarding uptake from J.D. Power and M:Metrics (as well as a projection from IDC). Also, the idea that the story is some sort of pep rally for ringbacks is laughable, and I certainly didn’t claim ad ringbacks are a “good or marketable idea.” Ad ringbacks may be ridiculous, but it certainly looks like they’ll come to market.

Colin
And that’s your proof of ringbacks traction? They were also predicting the world of ringtone market a year ago…

Rafat -

Your criticism is a bit incorrect. Ringbacktones are doing well—just call the carriers and ask them. Granted not all carriers in the USA have figured them out just yet, and many are screwing up their deployments, calling them completely different things, but these are teething problems, and those who have figured them out are making good bank.

The last pure source of data that was available on this are the public filings of Widerthan. Before they were acquired by Real, they were transitioning from 60 mil/annum upwards of 100 mil/annum and this was the closest thing to a pureplay RBT vendor in the market. I can’t recall the portion of WT’s USA revenue but it was definitely material as they had/have a big deal with VZW.  Real doesn’t look like it’s breaking out the WT USA revenue either, but why not call them up and ask?

While I agree that most analysts are full of it, and their projections are complete baffle gab baked and sold at $3000 per report, this RCR article does more than cite just analyst projections. It cites actual historical data too:

“9% of U.S. mobile consumers used the application—slightly more than those who used instant messaging or accessed the Web from their handsets. “

9% seems pretty material to me. No? So about ~30 million people have signed up to RBT. Not bad.

And granted this historical data may have been acquired through a statistically inferred method, ie. who knows how JD Power and M:Metrics are getting this data—is it through panel surveys? or through actual carrier logs and revenue reports?

Either way, just call up the USA carriers and ask them how are RingBackTones doing this year in comparison to last year? Or call up Jamba and ask them, why would you invest in a D2C RBT offering?

On that last point, when have you known Jamba to take a half-assed approach to any D2C offering? If they’re queuing up RBT, you can pretty much guarantee it’s consumer-rape-and-pillage time!

Ringbacks, or RBT (Ring Back Tone) here in Indonesia, is a HUGE hit. Believe it or not, record labels here got more revenue from ringbacks than from actual album sales.

I thought that the ringback article was good and it was nice to see my industry in the news.

I’m not sure why Rafat slammed it so and cast the market opportunity aside, and I thought that was bad form on his part.

At RealNetworks, I’m encouraged by the increasing penetration of ringback services that we provide to various US operators and if everyone works together to provide more value to the consumer for this product, a penetration rate on par with the Asian customer base is certainly achievable.

“Please enjoy this free ringback service from <carrier name><ringback.mp3>” ....would be an awesome marketing tool by a mobile network operator or MVNO. Every time someone called you they would hear the operators name and they would wonder why their own opeator charges them tons of money for it each month.  I’m not convinced that ‘soda company’ ad’s would be very user friendly and I agree with Rafat on that one.

I wonder if they will ever let us upload our own Mp3’s? Anyone have any input on this?

If MNO’s want traction, they should offer free ringbacks for 6 months. If I was signed up for a free ringback service I probobly would not switch back when it started to bill me .... ‘what would my friends think!?”