Really the world is crazy... We were dreaming to apply such model (free-TV for end-users) only 2 years ago for DSL IPTV, but now I see that this is already working for Wi-Fi networks!
Hypewifi has yet another model of providing users with free Wi-Fi through support from advertising. In their model, a user must answer a few demographic questions which are tied to their profile in order to surf. These demographic questions allow more closely targeted advertising, they say, without exposing a particular user's details. Advertisers can choose to only target those whose profile matches their needs extremely closely.
This kind of approach requires a very high volume of users as qualifying users because winnowing down all users to find just the reasonable targets of ads means that an advertising inventory can't be served uniformly. Sell a million ad impressions and you see just 50,000 qualified users come through for a few pages each, and you've got a lot of unsold inventory. (You could have low-rate salvage ads displaying for "unqualified" users; this is why some sites seem littered with T-shirt ads, for instance. Although let me not mock the billions spent each year on message T-shirts.)
Hypewifi looks for locations where users would want free Wi-Fi and where professionals that meet the demographic that they want to offer to advertisers would congregate. The company says that they have 1,000 registered users so far with a soft launch.
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