SMS Access Revives Chinese Portals Finances

I’ve written elsewhere about the rise of multimedia mobile telephone access to the Internet and how online publications outside the U.S. are using SMS as a micropayment solution. The South China Morning Post now reports (requires paid access) that China’s three biggest portal sites are using those methods to revive their finances. Chinese government censorship of the wired Internet is ironically helping. More than 3,3000 cybercafes have been shutdown in the People’s Republic, thus many users are switching to their mobile phones for Internet access. China has more than 200 million mobile phone users, all with SMS, many with GPRS ‘always on’ Internet access, and some even with MMS. Sina.com, Sohu.com, and NetEase.com have begun charging them 1.5 yuan (US$0.18) per wireless access. Those aggregate revenues helped NeEase eke out a US$4,600 profit during 2nd Qtr 2002. Sohu posted a $112,000 profit in roughly period, causing a rise in stock price that made it NASDAQ’s fifth biggest gainer this week.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.