mGinger spams blindly. Sucks!
mGinger is a well funded startup ($2M) that helps you in freeing up your mobile bills and get exciting deals in on your mobile. From what I understand, they basically pay you to receive ads on your mobile. Whether this is a neat idea or not is debatable and we will debate it later. What has really infuriated me is the fact that mGinger is actually spamming people by email to join their service. So they are basically trying to build a spam free mobile solution (you need to opt in to get ads) and spreading it by email spamming. Quite ironical.
The great thing about their spam is that they are not spamming all that blindly. They have acquired some database of users and their connections (not sure from where) and their invitations look like invitations for friends. I have verified from people that they never sent such invitations. There cannot be a bigger proof than the fact that I got an invitation from a friend who passed away last month (I can prove this if needed). This has seriously infuriated me and I think mGinger is generating massive negative PR by doing so. If well funded startups in the mobile space pull such cheap tricks to spread, I am not sure where the whole bazillion dollar indian mobile market is headed.
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Comments
Hi Prateek,
This model has more cons than pros. I have done a detailed analysis of this business at
http://www.enidhi.net/2007/06/mginger-feasibility-study-should-i.html
Have a look.
Also have blogrolled you.
Lot of websites these days send spam by asking readers to share their gmail user id and passwords. These sites send unsolicited spam invitations in the identity of user to all entries in their address book.
Few legitimate ones let you select whom you want to invite while others invite entire address book…
Bad that mginger also resorting to such cheap and dirty tricks.
Gosh.. I knew it…! That sucks so bad.
Yes, Shrinidhi, I see most of the social networking and such new startups resort to illegitimate ways.
Even some apps in Facebook! Won’t name’em here.
The problem in India is that Venture Capitalists in India seem to reward steep subscriber growth numbers without adequate due diligence on how those numbers were achieved. Atleast one social network that I know spammed me with fictitious names was acquired by a spam-friendly mainstream media house which is currently busy spamvertizing their shiny new job portal. With VC money and quick exits at stake who cares about outdated Internet e-mail ethics.
Hey !
How’s the idea of you getting paid money to receive messages on your mobile? How’s the idea of your mobile being able to pay its own bills?
Sounds fantastic ! Doesn’t it ?! We’ll.then here’s m-earn for you . m-earn will pay you for every SMS you receive from advertisers you choose to receive messages from ! All you need to do is furnish your interests and sit back.And while you get paid for it,your mobile will tell you the best offers from your favourite brands and stores.
What’s more, you can decide how many and at what time you’d like to get your messages !
Check out. http://www.m-earn.com:8080/Beta/index.jsp?inviteID=686
And if you get your friends in the loop - basically build your own m-earn network , you can multiply your earnings ! Wow !
Sign up and Start Earning Bindaas !
Mahinder yadav
lol.. you write about mginger spamming you and here’s a comment about another such site..m-earn asking users to sign up..ahhah… don’t you think you should be spamming the comment!!??
The revenue model of these services is not clear to me.
It seems like they are thriving on ad revenue only which is not the best way to go about. Morever, with so many sms application coming, it has become really irritating to receive only ads in SMS. The users who are joining MGinger are joining to earn money to receive ads … and not actually to get offers. This is not good for the advertisers as well.
I like the model of 160by2 to some extent. They are selling tag words to advertisers. If an user to sending a SMS to his friend and that word is present, the ad appears on the next 80 words. Only the limit of 80 words seems to hinder here.
I tried that a few months back(probably 1 year back) and i used to get ads of Dairy Milk, for key word “Love”(no prizes guessing what i was smsing.)
But this is a very good concept coz, the advertisers gets to build a good brand name in this.
Lets us see some more innovation in the mobile advertising field.
Second thing which baffles me is the amount of funding these companies get. Are the investors seeing something we are not able to see. May be some investor lets us know, what are looking at.