Singapore’s internet war continues to heat up with new entrant StarHub claiming to have signed up 100,000 users for its free internet access service in a week, despite rival Singapore Telecom having announced it will launch its own enhanced free service next year.
A third access and content provider, Nasdaq-listed regional operator Pacific Internet has upped the ante by announcing it will pay users to go to its e-commerce portal and web site Pacfusion.com. Using this strategy PacNet plans to hijack the surfers roaming cyberspace, courtesy of the free access provided by StarHub and SingNet, to its e-commerce portal. The two telcos are hoping to finance their free services via advertising and e-commerce transactions on their own web sites.
In a statement PacNet said it will revolutionize internet marketing by introducing Asia’s first program that pays users to surf its sites. It said the reward program will significantly increase eyeball, shopping and other e-commerce traffic at the Pacfusion.com portal.
This growth in traffic will increase our advertising revenue, which is one of the faster growing revenue streams for Pacific Internet, said Larry Ang, PacNet’s group general manager (e-business).
Under the reward program, people who visit Pacfusion.com and any other sites hosted on the portal will earn points called atoms. These atoms can be used to buy products and services in the e-commerce outlets located at Pacfusion.com, including another PacNet site, PI Mall, which features more than 80 vendors and 10,000 products.
Nicholas Lee, PacNet’s chief executive officer, gloated: We are delighted surfers can now visit our Pacfusion.com portal for free, thanks to SingNet and StarHub. We are channeling our traffic to StarHub and SingTel to give our subscribers a chance to surf free on their bandwidth, to get to PacNet. We then take all the ad revenues, as they are on our sites.
Lee said that PacNet plans to invest up to $100m in Pacfusion.com, a unit launched last month to focus on opportunities in e-commerce, content, community and communications services. He said that the company is aggressively building up its broadband-enabled content in Singapore and the region.
Until StarHub shook up the industry last week SingNet and PacNet, comfortably the top two internet access service providers in Singapore, had depended on access charges for the bulk of their revenues.
StarHub has now achieved 50% of its 12-month target number of registrants within a week of launching, but says its brand new servers and routers for the free surfers can handle up to 200,000 users and are easily scalable. And in view of the overwhelming response it has received so far, StarHub it is bringing forward its infrastructure expansion plan.
And although it is not planning to pay visitors to its sites, StarHub says they will be made sticky with the help of contents provided by Yahoo! An official said with a guaranteed number of eyeballs visiting its sites every day, StarHub Internet can be assured of raking in the advertising dollars. We used to chase after advertisers. In the last few days, it’s the reverse, he said, with StarHub now talking to a group of new advertisers.
