In-flight Ad supported Free Wifi
As wifi enabled planes become the standard and there are no other places where you can be untethered from your digital world, it seems to make sense to try to monetize the environment with ad supported access. The question I ask is why hasn’t it worked in other digital access offerings? NetZero? People PC, etc? Was it the user experience? The interface or lack of interface?
Seeing more and more ad supported browsing environments pop-up, like hospital waiting rooms in Canada, as users are cutting costs maybe this is an opportunity to deliver access that is ad supported as a real value ad. But outside 30,000 feet and maybe underground (ie. subways) where are we where out portable devices don’t get access?
In-flight ad system lets flyers kill time for free | VentureBeat
In-flight ad system lets flyers kill time for free
October 6, 2009 | Paul Boutin | Comments |Wi-Fi advertising network JiWire, which serves ad pages to coffeehouse laptop users, has partnered with in-flight broadband provider Row 44 to create a portal called Skytown Center that will let laptop-toting flyers surf the best version of SkyMall ever.
JiWire will deliver the ads to Skytown’s home page, as shown in the mockup below. Depending on how the airline configures the system, flyers may have their choice of Internet access, ad-supported free Internet access, or free advertising content.
For now, no airlines have officially declared that they’ll be using Skytown Center. But Southwest and Alaska have tested Row 44’s system, which connects from an in-flight plane to a satellite. Row 44’s system can connect flyers to the Internet, or give them offline content to peruse.
