I have been getting IM spam on gtalk to get me to sign up on heysan. It comes from my gtalk friends and leads to a google sign in but on heysan.com. It's the exact same message coming from multiple people so its definitely autogenerated.
This shady approach, even if it's coming from a 3rd party incentivized to market heysan, mars this otherwise impressive achievment. Even if this is spam in the plaxo sense, I don't think it's a good thing.
I came in to say the exact same thing. Hey, san! It is not worth it irritating me, to for a small chance that I sign up. Plus I the people whose IMs I got the msg/spam from were not aware that I would be getting a msg from their IM. You might have said that in small print, but it is definately shady.
"This messages are because of vulnerability in Heysan.com.
Once you click on any of this messages your buddy list will also start receiving the similar messages."
"This is a virus link. Your Gmail account has been infected. You need to clean out your computer with antivirus and antispyware scanners." "Yeah, it sure is a virus and is spreading quite alarmingly. Be cautious where you enter your passwords."
"Every single mobile web service should be looking at these guys to see how they are doing things. The site is also beautifully designed with a really clean UI.
The proof that Heysan is onto something interesting is in the stats which are absolutely jaw dropping - and remind me of the kind of figures facebook used to pump out after they started which made everyone sit up and take notice. The average user spends over 5 hours a month on heysan, they are doing 100 million page views a month and have 600,000 users. What is also amazing is that the largest markets for Heysan are not Indonesia or India like a lot of other mobile IM aggregators, but the UK and the US."
Since Heysan is web-based IM chat, the question is how many page loads each user does per a single session ? I believe it's a couple of thousands, so the overall user-flow is not huge.
The other thing is the article states that most users of Heysan come from US, but Alexa disagrees with that. Here's some data:
India 82.0%
United States 8.4%
United Kingdom 1.3%
Germany 0.6%
Indonesia 0.4%
So, my conclusion is that Heysan is doing good PR with this article, nothing else :-). Kudos to Heysan!
Congratulations! Can you give us a sense of how successfully you've been able to monetize all the users you've gained? What sort of challenges do you face on that front?
We launched our virtual economy this summer and are just integrating premium (the ability to pay for virtual economy coins). We're live in 11 markets with premium and gradually adding more. People use their phone and something called WAP-billing to pay for the coins. $6.99 buys you 200,000 coins for example.
Historically monetizing users on mobile have been an order of magnitude easier than on the web. Ringtones is a billion dollar business for example. SMS is a $80 billion dollar business. What web services/categories can generate that kind of revenue? And SMS is a pretty poor protocol. The key is the built-in mobile micropayment system called PSMS or WAP-billing.
One of the companies we look at for inspiration is Mobagetown, a mobile web based community in Japan. It's a $250MM company in terms of revenues at just 10MM users.
Our main challenge is to make people realize that Alexa doesn't track mobile web ;)
problem 3: phones don't connect to isp's they connect to carrier wap gateways.
One attempt to track mobile is from Opera but it's highly skewed to the type of people that have Opera on their phones and the activity that's significant for them: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report/
Old phones. iPhone, Android -- these are the phones of the future. In three years, most people will probably have WebKit or Gecko running on their phone.
The iPhone is already the best selling phone in the US.
So, for quantified sites, audience composition is extrapolated from ISP data based on what? The Quantcast provided explanation (http://www.quantcast.com/docs/display/info/Next+page4) is pretty light on concrete details of how it extrapolate demographic data from cookie info.
Would love to hear a straight forward answer for this one. My clients love the data available, but give it low validity because not clear how its derived.
cool but destined to the same fate as meebo. the major IM players will never backdoor each other with out-of-agreement access to each others' users. if they wanted to, they could have all been doing that years ago, on mobile too. don't try to out-reason things, just accept that even though X and Y could interract trivially with open-source access libs, they would rather sit in a room for six months and do a one-off deal. so unless these guys get their own rev model, they will end up just like meebo...a cool service that is immune to acquisition
If you'll read some of the other comments, particularly the ones from the Heysan team, you'll notice that they have established a revenue model and probably don't require your unsolicited advice and proclamations.
Immune to acquisition from major IM networks. That still leaves the options of a) everyone else. b) hitting revenue and creating a viable long-term business.
Luckily the vast majority of our traffic is between Heysan-Heysan users.
On a high level IM is becoming a commodity. I'm not bullish on the long-term survival of MSN Messenger in it's current form. Facebook has just launched a much more relevant IM service than MSN or AIM will ever be.
The fundamental problem with IM remains, it's hard to monetize. As is social networking. With a built-in micropayment system the chances of succeeding there increases. That's why mobile makes a massive difference.
The existing IM networks have been bad/lazy about monetization. What meebo etc are doing is pretty cool. They have the audience, and now just have to turn the screws to extract money from them.
Not everyone is after an acquisition, and as far as I remember Meebo has enough money to go a few years while they figure out how best to monetize their massive audience.
This shady approach, even if it's coming from a 3rd party incentivized to market heysan, mars this otherwise impressive achievment. Even if this is spam in the plaxo sense, I don't think it's a good thing.