UK 3G operator, 3, launched SeeMeTV late last year, as a foray into User Generated Content (UGC – hot new TLA). The idea was that you took a short video on your 3 phone and uploaded it to 3’s servers at a cost to you of 50p (88 cents).
Then whenever someone else downloaded it, you earned the princely sum of 1p (1.7 cents). Like many pundits, I thought that most people would be lucky to earn their 50p back, let alone earn a serious return on the investment.
While that’s probably true in the vast majority of cases, there is a way to earn money though and that’s by amateur porn. According to Mobile Marketing Magazine one lucky female subscriber earned ¨£1,300 ($2,305) in a month for making a video of herself flashing her breasts, which translates into an impressive 130,000 downloads.
So did the 3 team tap into this hidden market knowingly, or was it merely serendipity? A condition of SeeMeTV is “‘DonǃÙt strip naked, nobody wants to see your bits on their handset.”
Shows how much they know then.
If you can read this, you’ll almost certainly remember a time when having your wife or girlfriend flash her breasts for publication in the media was something that wasn’t really done, outside of a few specialist top shelf magazines. Now, the Maxim affect has made it mainstream.
Is this a good thing, or don’t we really care?
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