It has now happened again! -Once again a parent must face a bill from their kids online explorations.
A kid/tween uses his mother’s credit card for purchasing virtual items. This time it is the popular Facebook app “Farmville” that experiences media exposure from having a user spending money without the parent’s knowledge.
This time the loss was £900 – not to be refunded by Zynga – the company behind “Farmville”.
3 years – incubation time
Was the time for phone companies to go from no responsibility regarding limits on SMS spending to actually taking actively part in setting limitations to usage of Premium SMS.
4 of the major phone companies in Denmark are now, finally, entering the scene and have now stated that they will set limits regarding Premium SMS. This limit is to avoid huge phone bills to costumers using their mobile as a payment method and will be implemented September 1st 2010..
You can read PDF with the commitment HERE.
Why is that?
Looking back four years I was defending online payments using Premium SMS in Danish media.
The main issue was “Who is to ensure teens do not spend too much money using Premium SMS”.
Money!
Keeping track of your online business on a day to day level can give you valuable information about how smooth the machinery is running.
This tracking seems like the most obvious thing to do, however a lot of companies tend to forget this and use weekly or monthly evaluations to make sure that things are going the right direction.
Simple monitoring of the business can enable you to see immediate impact from previous day(-s) work effort. This gives a clear picture of the conditions of your business and at the same time the opportunity to act during the process.
When looking at virtual worlds some of the needed KPIs to be monitored are:
Traffic:
New traffic
Retention
..All related to marketing AND user experience on site.
Spending money online?
Entering almost any teen community the option of spending real money is getting more and more common.
This has caused some discussions in the media.
Is it stealing from kids? Or is it a reflection of how the real worlds actions are being projected into the teen’s virtual identity?
The answer will definitely depend on what audience you ask.
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