Building on their experience of O2 Litmus and Open Movilforum, Telefonica have launched BlueVia, see presentation below. Critically, this is a world-first in the API exposure business because they are sharing the love with developers, between 10-20% of traffic revenue, and 50% of ad-revenue. As you’d expect its web-centric with protocols and languages such as OAuth, REST, C#, Ruby, PHP and Java.
In addressing the two main developer needs: direct access to a large customer base and a clear path to cash. Apps go into the Telefonica app store which is available throughout the group – immediately 80M subscribers, there’s the standard 70:30 revenue split, and the differentiating cream on top is the stimulated traffic revenue share.
As discussed previously mobile telecoms is a $1T market, with SMS making up 150B in 2009, and climbing to $233B in 2014. It’s easy to see how the 10-20% rev share creates an interesting revenue source for developers and critically enables operators to harness their business model to differentiate from the device / web stores.
Alcatel-Lucent has been doing revenue share with its Open API Service for roughly the past year, so not sure I’d call this a world-first. But your last paragraph is spot-on 🙂
Mike Maney
Director, Influencer Management
Alcatel-Lucent
Hi Mike,
As ALU is a supplier and hence has a different business model, I’d expect you to eat your own dog food 😉 There are operators who have already deployed rev share for network usage with developers, e.g. Etisalat Sri Lanka. BlueVia is the first from the big guys, and I wanted to complement their needed leadership in this space.
Alan