18 November 2008

Fring to Switch to Subsidized Usage
With Integrated On-Device Advertising!?

The fring service is free and with intention to keep it free forever, fring’s dev team has decided to shift to the ad-financed model and roll out new fring ads program as a way to recover development costs, and to continue with providing their chat and mobile VoIP service to the user free of charge.

I understand that it becomes necessary to run ad service and display ads in order to keep service free but from other hand I’m sure that there are bunch of users that will be irritated with new add supported fring.

Not because they will be irritated by a small graphical ads in the middle of an application but because it’s a waste of bandwidth, which is especially problem for users on limited data plans and slower connections like EDGE or even worse GPRS!

We wanted to give you the heads-up, as you may soon see small clickable advertising banners in the fring chat window, beneath the chat itself. Clicking the ad will open your browser and take you to the advertiser’s site; you may even find extra special offers, cool promos & other nice surprises behind the click from time to time :-) And, more clicks mean happy advertisers; and happy advertisers mean more resources for us to develop cool new stuff for you to play with in fring!

We’re starting the ad trials with just a small number of randomly selected fringsters each day and we’ve worked hard to make sure that your fringing experience isn’t affected in any way, but as always, we’re really keen to hear your feedback.

There is no doubt that with this service fring will get a new powerful method of monetizing their application with advertising but only time will show us if this has been a good decision?