That's correct - Opera was fantastic in emerging market and had a great proposition for the telcos. The space they sold was only good for subscription portal - as the smart phone version was not that good. In these emerging markets esp India/BD the $25 USD symphony smart phone handsets do not have enough memory to download any apps - it was completely loaded up with other apps that you could not remove. In terms of the sponsored data it was a little different, all you had to do was subscribe to the portal (could be ringtones/wallpapers/vids etc) then the following day you would get your 50mb of data. Opera was buying the data in bulk and selling it to the vas providers. Problem you have in these markets is you have a ceiling of subscribers that have access to opera - multiple subs on each service and compound that to arpu's in the market. Then it was a race to be the first to bill the users each day with max retries, whoever had this relationship with the SDP WINS.
As I said before im more then happy to give you real insights of similar services for emerging markets. I have stated before when i tried freeway both in Malaysia and India it had very limited content and every telco is giving out free data as their reward and earn campaigns.
SYT Price at posting:
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