Publishers Refuse to Pay for AvantGo Readers
A year and a half ago I interviewed the publisher partner director at AvantGo looking for a catch. She was enormously blase and rather bored with the whole conversation. They would allow almost anyone to publish on the channel. Yeah it didn’t cost anything to reach AvantGo users. Yeah some publishers saw a leap in opt-in subscriptions to their regular newsletters as a result (Michael Tchong of ICONOCAST in particular). What was the catch? She said, well they’d charge if you wanted your name to be placed in their channel listings to catch users attention and garner wireless subscribers. (You didn’t need to be listed to be carried, users could find you anyway if they knew how.) So paying them anything was purely an optional ad buy.
Now it turns out AvantGo’s policies have changed to require you pay for AvantGo readers. So loads of publishers are bailing. To learn more, check out this message board at PocketPC Thoughts. My thanks to David Lawrence of Online Tonight for this link!
Original interview:
http://www.contentbiz.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1126
New AvantGo Policies
http://avantgo.com/support/mobile_support/index.html
Publisher Reaction to New Policies:
http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=249
Categories: Uncategorized
