Not the same banana I mention below
You’ve seen those adverts on T.V. at all times of the day. They offer you ringtones, wallpapers and all sorts of videos. What you don’t see is the teensy tiny writing that says “R60 per week” or some other outlandish number per day/week/month. The nasty reality is that these services charge consistently until you stop using the service. Now I’m not sure if you get to keep the content once you stop paying but either way, it seems odd to have to pay “rent” for a ringtone or a wallpaper. I was quoted a fact today of one company making a R200 million profit off these services so there’s clearly a lot of suckers out there.
I had the pleasure of being forced to watch some of these adverts yesterday and while almost all of them were burned from my mind one stood out: the dancing banana ringtone. Now not only was this extremely catchy as a song but what really stood out for me was the fact that it cost a massive R14 per two days! Do the math, that’s R210 a month for a dumb ring tone. My entire cellphone bill comes to a little more than that. Considering there were other services that cost R60 per week I thought the dancing banana was actually pretty reasonable.
And let’s not even start with the actual content here because we can get onto a whole new conversation but easy access to pornography is a long discussion I’m not going to get into. Either way, it’s quite a dubious business.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with capitalism. Frankly if you buy something then pay a certain amount for it. What I have a problem with is that these services are taking advantage of those people that are stupid enough to not read the fine print. Now based on the amount of advertising that these companies put together it seems likely that there’s plenty of money being made in the ring tone industry. The moral is thus: charge a fair amount and don’t hide or downplay the cost and feed on suckers.
Is it acceptable that this is going on? Most certainly not. The question is though, what is going to be going on to regualte this industry and why are they being allowed to rip people off willy nilly? I propose an industry regulator that sets limits on rates as well as negotiates cheaper content so that there is no issue with profit margins.
I’m putting out an open offer for anyone that wants a specific ring tone or piece of content to give me an ADSL voucher and I’ll download it for you. Yip, I’d rather advocate piracy than lets these scum suckers take advantage of the underprivledged in this country. Remember kids, you can get it all on Bittorrent and piracy is so much better than getting ripped off.
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WASPA.org.za
There is a regulatory body, the problem is that the body is made up of people entrenched in the industry.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the revenue model though, it has a time-stamp.