Adult approach

At a seminar on Adult content for mobiles organised by the Network for Online Commerce and 160 Characters, Ashley Clark of CC Media, said his top billing mobile customer had spent $4,000 on chat services since June. He said CC Media has a turnover of $70,000 to $95,000 a day.

Julia Dimambro, managing director of Cherry Media, which sells softcore images and "wallpaper" for phones but is starting to offer more hardcore, recommended the direct-to-consumer approach. She believes advertising your services can often be a more profitable route to market than negotiating to be on operators' portals.

Mike Grenville of 160 Characters said that if mobile operators did not get their act together on issues like revenue sharing and the way in which downloading third-party data incur charges, he could see people downloading adult content on to Apple Ipods and other mobile music devices and paying to unlock it at a later date.

A speaker from Playboy, which is already getting involved in podcasting (voice broadcasts you download on to an Ipod or similar) cancelled his appearance due to family problems.

But the seminar drew a large and diverse audience. As well as a representative from Soho baron Paul Raymond's empire, there was content aggregator Mobile Streams, which includes adult content among its information, venture capital firm Interregnum, and top IT lawyer Ingrid Silver from DentonWildeSapte.

Mr Clark, who is business development manager of CC Media, said his typical customer spends $550 a year and, perhaps, $750 in his time as a customer, so the important thing is to keep offering new services to keep them interested.
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