With a Category Four hurricane barreling down on the state of Florida, experts from the adult website billing industry spoke at the summer Internext Expo convention in Hollywood, Florida on Friday, August 13th.With a Category Four hurricane barreling down on the state of Florida, experts from the adult website billing industry spoke at the summer Internext Expo convention in Hollywood, Florida on Friday, August 13th. In the second of two seminars focusing on billing issues, speakers discussed how webmasters can monetize their international traffic using billing solutions such as the emerging SMS and more traditional phone dialers. Mitch Platt from NoCreditCard.com started the seminar with a thirty-minute presentation on international billing solutions, and a panel of experts followed up with a thirty-minute roundtable discussion of certain hot-button international billing topics. The discussion panel included Benjamin Bayr from SexMoney, Tanja Rahaman from Goodthinxx, Fred Warner from ActiveNet, and Lee Ali from Opera Telecom.
Compared with the turnout for “Billing Part One,” attendance was down slightly for “Billing Part Two.” The event kicked off at 2:00 in the afternoon in a conference room on the second floor of the comfortable Diplomat Hotel. The proceedings were recorded by show host AVN, and several cameras were set up in strategic locations about the room. AVN has told YNOT that interested parties will be able to view all seminar recordings on a pay-per-view basis in the near future.
The thirty minute presentation by Platt carried a straightforward message: webmasters should use telecom billing solutions to increase a website’s international reach and improve its bottom line. Pointing out that it costs nothing to offer telecom billing, Platt argued that such alternative payment solutions serve a steadily growing market that shouldn’t be ignored.
Joking that the acronym SMS stands for “Sell More Sex,” Platt said that this rising pay-by-wireless-phone billing solution allows websites to charge per-session, as opposed to the more traditional monthly billing option, and to advertise “anonymous access by phone” as an alternative to traditional credit card billing. This option, according to Platt, is attractive to those surfers who are wary about giving out their credit card information on the internet.
Although Platt argued that dialers are still an attractive option for dial-up internet users, some of the panelists talked about the diminishing role of dialers as broadband grows in popularity – today a smaller percentage of surfers have phone lines connected to their computers. According to the panel, SMS billing can pick up the slack when dialers lose users to broadband.
The panel also pointed out that dialers have had a rough time recently due to the actions of unethical webmasters who have abused dialers to make a dishonest buck. Webmaster fraud has already resulted in dialers being banned in Switzerland, and now Spain has banned dialers as well.
According to the panel, there’s no justification for failing to offer alternative billing solutions to your websites’ visitors. Alternative billing costs nothing to set up, and will only increase your bottom line. Dialers are still effective, but cell phone-powered SMS billing solutions are on the rise with an impressive potential for growth in the next few years.
Comments concerning YNOT News stories can be sent to editor@ynotmasters.com, or public discussion of all YNOT News articles is available through the YNOT Masters message boards.
