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Advertising

December 21, 1999

Ad-Supported Free Paging on its Way

If you're willing to put up with advertising, you can get a free PC, free Internet access, even free software. Now, the Carson City, Calif.-based TotallyFreePaging.com is offering free paging services supported by advertising.

The company name is a bit of a misnomer. The customer still must pay $59.95 for the pager plus a $25 activation fee, but everything's free after that--alphanumeric paging, voice mail, email and faxing services. The catch? Every page the customer receives is preceded by a three-line advertisement.

To David Uman, CEO of TotallyFreePaging.com, the pager delivers a guaranteed audience to the advertiser. "When a pager goes off, people look at it," he says. Because customers who register for the service will have to submit demographic information--age, gender, marital status, hobbies, pets, household members, education level, etc.--the service will be able to deliver targeted advertising opportunities to its advertisers. Whether customers will give up all that information remains to be seen.

TotallyFreePaging also is working on partner agreements that would allow it to deliver sponsored content through the pagers, such as sports scores, weather reports, stock quotes, news tickers and the like. Uman declined to identify the content providers because of nondisclosure but says content providers--mainly web content sites--would be able to offer their own branded pagers as part of the deal. That would help speed up distribution of the pagers, which is one of the biggest challenges TotallyFreePaging faces in launching the service, Uman says. The company would share revenue with its content providers.

The service launched in California last week and is due to launch nationwide Jan. 6. But aren't pagers yesterday's technology, as more functional cell phones and PDAs become able to do the same tasks? Uman says that's true to a point, and in fact his company is pursuing a strategy for cell phones and PDAs, but needs to make the model work for pagers now. He says the current telecommunications infrastructure only supports the service for pagers and that will remain the case for at least another three or four years. So for now, TotallyFreePaging.com can save customers monthly service charges upwards of $29.99 a month, if only they'll be willing to serve as a target market for advertisers.

"I wish these other guys [paging services] would wake up and see that their revenue model's not working," Uman says. "They have to step out of the box and rethink it."

--Dennis Callaghan

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