Big Gamble for Amp'd

Implications: Mobile content is a high stakes risky venture - as is building an MVNO, so Amp'd may strike gold or go down in flames.

As Amp'd is learning, offering your content to other carriers on their deck is good, but only if you are in one of the top placement slots - it really doesn't matter if you are #12 or #64 on the deck as no one goes that deep anyway.

While at Virgin Mobile, I found many times that selling content is very tricky - things you think will do well, may or may not perform as expected.  This makes creating costly content very risky.

Analysis: First of all, I applaud Amp'd for many of the things they do. I think that they are certainly pushing mobile content in the right direction however; I am always surprised at how they are viewed within the press. For a company that has announced only 200,000 subscribers, I wouldn't say they have necessarily hit a grand slam.

They often include impressive results within press releases such as the average ARPU is $100 with 30% attributed to data. They also state a large percentage of their downloads (30%) comes from the 5% of original content they create. It is hard to understand the numbers unless you can see the true impact on the P/L statement - without fully understanding the revenue share costs, data costs, licensing costs, application/services costs and creation costs, these figures may not be as appealing as they appear.