Mobile offers - getting paid per billed lead, rather than per lead?

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Dispel

Dispel

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An advertiser is offering to pay me per billing on their mobile campaigns. They're telling me thats called an 'MO opt in'.

What this basically means is that rather then getting paid for the lead when someone enters their phone number, I would only get paid once that number has been billed successfully. The advertiser attempts to bill the phone number twice - straight away or later that day and then if that billing failed they re-attempt to bill the number that night.

Obviously this is a glorious way to lose a shitload of leads. They are trying to tell me that most mobile companies are doing this now, even when they are tracked through networks.


Is that true?

Anyone working direct with an advertiser getting paid this way?

Anyone working at a network that can confirm that yes, you only credit leads for mobile offers when the advertiser confirms an MO opt in?


Dispel
 


Well, Ask them for a recurring percentage of the amount they bill the user. Now it's a win-win :)
 
We have a few mobile offers on our network and none have the MO opt in. Frankly, if a mobile offer like that came to us, we'd likely reject it. it puts too much faith in the advertiser not to fuck us (or our affiliates) by saying of the 100 leads you sent only 4 billed out, sorry. We'd also have no way to track that real time and so the only person who wins out in that scenario is the adv. not worth it.
 
Not complaining about the thread because this is interesting, but personally did you really need to start a thread about this? lol. This will obviously fuck you and they are obviously lying when they say this is how everyone is doing it. I quick look around al the networks you are a member of would show that there isn't a single offer out there like that.

That's why they approached you individually.
 
dooby said:
Why not?
Click to expand...
For recurring?

  1. Most people don't stay on the mobile billing stuff after they figure it out.
  2. You can't calculate your ROI at any given point with recurring payments.
#2 is the biggest to me. If I'm not sure how much I'm going to make from a lead(total) my choices as they come in pretty much suck.
For recurring payouts my choices are:

  1. Cross my fingers and hope after running weeks and weeks of traffic to it that it's going to be profitable when the leads finish backing out.
  2. Hold the campaign back by making sure that it's backing out after the first payout of each lead(much more volume is possible by not constraining it, but the risk is unnecessarily high imo)
Neither of those are appealing to me. Especially in a niche that has a habit of getting sued and losing carriers(hint: you'd lose the recurring payout most likely if the persons carrier got dropped or the company got sued).

I'm not really a mobile guy, so those are off the top of my head.
 
There's nothing shady about it, they're doing it to ensure they don't get fucked. If they scrub everyone to a ridiculous extent like you suggested, they're only destroying their own revenue stream because affiliates will stop promoting the offer if they're scrubbing 80% of the leads and it isn't profitable.
 
xmcp123 said:
For recurring?

  1. Most people don't stay on the mobile billing stuff after they figure it out.
  2. You can't calculate your ROI at any given point with recurring payments.
#2 is the biggest to me. If I'm not sure how much I'm going to make from a lead(total) my choices as they come in pretty much suck.
For recurring payouts my choices are:

  1. Cross my fingers and hope after running weeks and weeks of traffic to it that it's going to be profitable when the leads finish backing out.
  2. Hold the campaign back by making sure that it's backing out after the first payout of each lead(much more volume is possible by not constraining it, but the risk is unnecessarily high imo)
Neither of those are appealing to me. Especially in a niche that has a habit of getting sued and losing carriers(hint: you'd lose the recurring payout most likely if the persons carrier got dropped or the company got sued).

I'm not really a mobile guy, so those are off the top of my head.
Click to expand...
Good points there.

and yea the ROI part is important.
 
Also, MO opt-in has nothing to do with paying for settled transactions. The payout structure can be implemented with PIN opt-in.
 
It depends on the country -- a good portion of Europe is only MO billing instead of MT billing in the US/UK. What that means is that companies that truly want to offer a CPA based on acquired users will need to payout on an MO basis. What country is this being promoted in? Is the promotion being done online?

If it's online the only other way around this is to get a CPL per phone submit which is how it generally works for smaller players in these countries but keep in mind that they will factor in a scrub on this number to account for variability in your opt-in to double opt-in conversion rate. I would suggest taking the offer and placing a floor price per phone submit clause in the agreement.
 
xmcp123 said:
For recurring?

  1. Most people don't stay on the mobile billing stuff after they figure it out.
Click to expand...

Good point. Its my understanding that a very large percentage of people that convert on mobile offers, CANCEL the subscription as soon as they get the first text message because they get worried about biling, which means a lot will only get billed once.
 
Quite frankly, I've been in the mobile industry for 2+ year, almost 3.

I've never seen an advert offer this to an affil.

Simpy because getting paid per lead is much better for you.

Seems to me he doesn't have enough money to float for leads, so he'd rather do somekind of rev share.

Either way, I'd stay away if I was you.

My 2 cents ....
 
fremin said:
It depends on the country -- a good portion of Europe is only MO billing instead of MT billing in the US/UK. What that means is that companies that truly want to offer a CPA based on acquired users will need to payout on an MO basis. What country is this being promoted in? Is the promotion being done online?

If it's online the only other way around this is to get a CPL per phone submit which is how it generally works for smaller players in these countries but keep in mind that they will factor in a scrub on this number to account for variability in your opt-in to double opt-in conversion rate. I would suggest taking the offer and placing a floor price per phone submit clause in the agreement.
Click to expand...
A subscription does not exist if MO billing is the only billing method. Thus, there's no calculating of life time values, only whether the user was billable or not. However people are very confused between MO opt-in (reply y) and MO billing (user must send a message to be billed, users can only be billed when they send messages). All subscription based programs use MT billing (content provider sends you a message which then you are billed for).

Note: There are some ultra wierd exceptions to the rule here, particularly in germany where your doing direct mobile billing or when WAP billing takes place. However - you can use the the above as a rule of thumb.

Eddie.
 
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