Mobile im War free flow Facebook teaches successful experience

Recently, Alibaba "contacts", NetEase Telecom "Easy Letter" has been announced, will launch their own flow free plan, by them for users to use, mobile phone Taobao, Ishin and other products flow to the bill.

The reason they are willing to pay the operators for their customers is simple: "Rob people" and attract more mobile users to use their services. In the current competition pattern of mobile internet, "between", "easy Letter" and other products than "micro-letter" is not a measure level.

In the past competition of the internet, "free" is often the most basic competitive means for the latter to face the strong. And in the face of the micro-letter, free of charge is obviously not enough for users to pay the bill became Alibaba, NetEase Telecom think of the newly-made.

In fact, from the global perspective, "free flow" is not the first Chinese market players. Facebook, the world's social giant, has been using it in its transition to mobile Internet.

Taro Kodama, the national development manager at Facebook, said Facebook and its operator-driven 0-rate program had succeeded in raising the number of users on the mobile side, with 49% of Facebook's revenue coming from the mobile end, which was zero last year.

Flow free War

In mobile data traffic on the fuss, Tencent is one of the first manufacturers to try, but not completely. As early as July this year, Tencent Micro-letter and Guangdong Unicom issued a "micro-trust" micro-letter-specific SIM card. Micro-credit card provides users with a number of exclusive functions, including more traffic.

However, it seems that the micro-credit card flow plan can only be regarded as "preferential", that is, users still need to pay a certain amount of money, but compared to directly from the operator to buy more cheap traffic.

After August, NetEase and Telecom jointly released the easy letter, the flow of war further. All telecommunications sky-wing users, the use of easy to generate traffic all free of charge. In addition, in 2013 before the end of the registration also presented China Telecom (52.97, 1.04, 2%) National traffic 300M, can be used in other applications.

However, easy to believe that "free flow" is still not thorough enough, only mobile phone users can enjoy. Because the easy letter is NetEase and the telecommunication cooperation product, this only is the internal resource exchange. Whether it is easy to cooperate with telecom traffic, or the previous micro-letter and Guangdong Unicom traffic concessions, application providers do not need to pay operators.

Until recently Alibaba announced, and Mobile, unicom in some provinces to reach cooperation, to provide users with free flow packets, mobile Internet "flow free" only entered the Mano stage.

According to Alibaba's plan, from November onwards, users on the mobile phone, mobile Taobao, Poly cost-effective, cat, Alipay and other Ali group-related client users will be able to receive the monthly 2G free flow of Alibaba package. The cost is paid by Alibaba.

Alibaba said that the first batch of flow free plan coverage, including Guangdong Mobile, Jiangsu Unicom, Zhejiang Unicom, Hunan Unicom and so on, the future will be depending on user experience and operator support capabilities to expand the scope of service and operating time. By the stimulation of Alibaba, easy letter began to follow quickly. Easy to believe that, starting from November 8 will implement a new flow free program, not only telecom users, the three major operators use Easy letter chat will no longer be restricted by mobile phone traffic.

"With the other two operators, it is by telecommunications, wing letter company to pay the bill." November 4, the wing letter company related Personage confirms to the reporter, the mobile, the Unicom user uses the easy letter the flow expense, will be paid by them.

Operator relationships are more important

With the follow-up "Free flow" of manufacturers more and more, the pressure is naturally thrown to Tencent.

Because whether it is "easy to Believe" or "contacts", the current user volume is not much, the resulting flow costs are also relatively low. And already has a large user base of the micro-letter, if you want to follow up, may pay a huge flow costs. In addition, the tense relationship between Tencent and Mobile (52.32, 0.16, 0.31%) may also pose additional hurdles to the negotiations.

However, from Facebook's experience, it is not unbearable for large, dominant vendors to pay for user traffic. Taro Kodama, a Japanese national development manager at Facebook, recently provided the Facebook development data at the mobile end of the Ericsson (11.99, 0.08, 0.63%) innovation Forum in Tokyo.

Kodama that Facebook's free flow of work with operators helped to boost Facebook's mobile-phone user activity in a short time. After the effect was achieved, Fecebook gradually ceased the policy.

He says, citing data from one Indian operator, Facebook, after ending the free flow of traffic, does have a lower degree of user activity than when it is free. "But the amount of data consumed is still much higher than it used to be," he said. In addition, according to their statistics, 75% of new users have survived, Kodama said.

Kodama believes that the relationship between global operators is crucial in such cooperation. "We need to provide them with a lot of incentives and new business models to get more involved in these collaborations," he said. ”

Specific to the Chinese market, due to the 4G licensing is imminent, how quickly the focus of their income from the voice to the data transfer, but also the operator 4G era of the most anxious problem. All three operators are motivated to explore new data-revenue models.

From this point of view, there will be more and more similar cooperation between mobile Internet manufacturers and operators in the future. And for mobile internet players, if they can handle the relationship with the operators, in the flow of cooperation to get more preferential support, will undoubtedly gain greater advantage.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)