When Dean Newton and Network Telephone Services Inc. founded Decade Mobile a little more than one year ago, it was with one simple goal: to make an indelible impact on the adult mobile space. By leveraging NTS’ two decades of experience in telephone entertainment and billing services (which generate monthly revenues and website visits in excess of $15 million and 50 million respectively, according to the company), Decade set about creating an infrastructure that would allow it to help adult entertainment brands to grow their revenues by “mobilizing” their content. In October 2005, the company signed a deal to distribute Matrix Content’s images and videos. In November, Decade launched its first “white-label” product: Decade TextChat.
“It’s a particularly successful product,” says Newton, who serves as Decade’s chief operating officer. “Experiential or ‘interactive’ products are definitely the leaders in the U.S. One of the things NTS noticed several years ago is that 20 percent of callers to its traditional sex lines were using cellular phones, so it was a perfect time to launch.” In large part, the appeal of Decade’s product is due to the large pool of American talent available through NTS, he notes. Additionally, because Decade TextChat is able to bill through both carrier-based SMS short codes and credit cards, it generates significant up-sell revenue, Newton says. Although chat hostesses must refrain from engaging in explicit conversations when users are billed by their mobile carriers, a seamless transition between carrier billing and credit card billing means consumers have to rein in their primitive urges only temporarily when conversations become extra spicy. According to Newton, Decade’s chat product is the first in the U.S. to incorporate such a billing mechanism.
Since July, the company also has been one of the first to enjoy multimedia enhancements. When the multimedia component debuted, it allowed users to exchange only images within the chat interface, but Newton says video exchanges won’t be far behind.
Significantly for adult entertainment companies, Decade’s TextChat is billed per message exchanged, not per minute. Because the chat hostesses are experienced professionals, they know how to keep customers chatting, and that increases the per-connection revenue for the service provider (in this case, the adult entertainment company that employs Decade’s white-label solution in custom-branded form). Better still, the product is designed in such a way that licensees can employ their own billing short codes (if they have them) or use a keyword within one of Decade’s short codes (“text SEX to 26969,” for example).
The whole thing is designed to put a layer of knowledgeable accountability between the adult entertainment provider and the mobile carriers, Newton says. “There’s an accountability issue with short codes,” he says. “People who are not accustomed to working in the mobile space may not realize how quickly their billing short codes can be revoked if their talent crosses a content line set by the carriers. SMS guidelines are similar to [what they were with] old phone-sex lines: You can’t get much more than flirtatious. However, with credit card billing, you’re off the leash.”
Newton says Decade’s built-from-scratch, proprietary system is working quite well, thank you. “We’re pulling more than six figures a month,” he reveals. He predicts that number will grow exponentially very soon. “Handsets and networks are changing very rapidly in the U.S.,” Newton says. “We’re almost at the point of taking technology innovation away from Europe. There’s been a shift in venture capital into mobile, especially the areas of bridging voice and text and enhanced multimedia. We’re seeing new companies emerge constantly, so we think it’s about ready to explode. [Mobile virtual network operators] are driving a much more diverse type of innovation in the U.S., and there’s been an incremental movement of the carriers toward age-verification guidelines, so we’ll probably be seeing more adult content on the portals by 2008 or 2009.”
As for Decade’s plans for the future, the company has some, but it’s keeping quiet about them. “We try not to over-promise,” Newton says. “We could promise the world, but we don’t want to. We definitely intend to use our position in the marketplace to innovate,” but primarily Decade’s innovation will be in the areas of creating storefronts, content distribution, and traffic.
Pictured: Dean Newton
