News & Notes

If you’re in the market for a quick and easy mobile website, Winksite is worth a look. A free account allows you to create up to 5 different mobile sites, which can each be customized from Winksite’s library of functionality (which they call channels).  Creating a site is as easy as giving it a name and a unique url (all linked off of winksite.com), and choosing what types of content you want to offer on your site.  The creation process starts with up to 3 pages of text, an option to mobilize your blog (via RSS), and choices from the community & collaboration channels (such as events, feeds, notes, chat, forum, surveys, guestbooks, and links).  You have the option of whether your site appears in Winksite’s directory and under what category and location (and content rating).

The interesting part of a Winksite mobile site is all the community functions (channels) you can include to increase return engagement.  Such channels include a journal, feeds, links, events, reports, notes, chat, forum, surveys, zine, and guestbook to create an almost Facebook-like social site around your mobile site.  You can also invite people to become members of your site, send broadcasts to members and send messages to other winksite’s.

Winksite currently does not offer any statistics other than basics (visits, members), but David Harper, Founder of Winksite, mentioned that may be a revenue model they’ll pursue in the near future.  Winksite integrates with several different mobile advertising platforms, including Google AdSense, admob, admoda and others.  You can control which channels ads showup on, as well as ad frequency and placement (top, botton, random, or top & bottom).  100% of the revenue collected from advertising is retained by the site owner, who can also create what are called self-service ads to advertise sponsors or self-promotions.

While their terms of service clearly says the Winksite’s service is for non-commercial use only, Harper says that they have many commercial sites using the service and have no problem with other commercial organizations using the site.  Harper’s long term goal is to get as many eyeballs on their mobilized sites as possible and build value eventually (he compared their business plan to Google’s).  Winksite has allowed Harper and parent company, Wireless Ink Corporation, to gather deep consumer insights into the mobile market, which they use for other paid services they offer and are developing (mobile sharing/consulting, etc.).  With over 60,000 publishers, including large companies such as Warner, Nokia, and Atlantic records, Winksite’s services are probably “safe” for use for other companies.

Give Winksite a try and let me know what you think.

Technorati tags: winksite, mobile, marketing, mobile advertising, business

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