What is direct Carrier Billing HUB? Let’s sort out together!

The goal of such an ecosystem development, based on the Golden Goose marketing platform, is to combine the efforts of the maximum number of market participants and achieve a synergistic effect, which increases the overall efficiency and profitability of mVAS products or services, for both individual participants and all participants together.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Then let’s try to figure out what DCB HUB is and what benefits each of the participants of this ecosystem receives, as well as who these participants are and how to become one of them.

What is the DCB HUB?

In order to learn more about the ecosystem and its advantages, first, you need to understand the meaning of the abbreviation DCB HUB, which is used as a name. The key feature and advantage of entertainment and information services in the mVAS market is their direct connection to the billing platform of telecom operators.

Access to the billing platform allows you to monetize mVAS services through the Direct Carrier Billing from the user’s account, or DCB, uses the website’s services to confirm the connection of the Single Opt-in or Double Opt-in model, depending on the operator’s requirements. This technology is considered to be the key to the existence, development and success of the mVAS market.

We have decided to create a single HUB or platform that would take into account all the specific requirements and technical nuances associated with the promotion of DCB offers. The next important element of the creation and development of such a DCB HUB is the unification of the majority of market participants in a single worldwide marketplace, the presence of which will expand channels and simplify cross-border interaction between mVAS services owners, advertisers and platforms around the world.

Who are the members of the DCB HUB ecosystem?

The mVAS ecosystem is formed by four key participants: mobile operators, service owners and developers, advertising platforms, and finally, mobile network users who consume mobile entertainment content.

Mobile operators

The basic element of the ecosystem is mobile operators, since the emergence of telecom companies and their infrastructure became the foundation for the development of the mobile Internet at the beginning of the millennium. Along with DCB, mobile Internet has become a key technology for the formation and development of modern mVAS services.

Today, it is telecom operators who set rules and restrictions for the promotion and monetization of mVAS services, thereby globally influencing the development of the market. Often, they are not direct participants in the DCB HUB platform. Nevertheless, mobile operators determine the rules of interaction between the other participants of the ecosystem, as well as the set of tools of the DCB HUB platform for monitoring and analyzing traffic quality.

Service providers

An important part of the DCB HUB ecosystem is the owners and developers of information and entertainment services, which, unlike operators, directly, and not indirectly, affect the development of the ecosystem. They are a catalyst for the entire process within the ecosystem, creating and developing services, as well as acting as a link that forms the final demand, including through advertising activity.

It is the service providers who are the link between the telecom operators and the subscribers, who are active participants in the ecosystem. Also, the service providers are responsible for the introduction by operators of new flows for the use of Direct Carrier Billing (DCB) from the user’s account. And if in the early 2000s only Premium SMS was used to monetize mobile content, today there is and is used a whole range of different flows in the world from 1click and 2click flow to mobile terminated flow with Prefilled and Wi-Fi Pin Submit.

Advertising platforms

Advertising platforms are also one of the essential elements of the modern mVAS market and key participants in the DCB HUB ecosystem, since the effectiveness of the entire ecosystem largely depends on the quality of distribution channel traffic and the quality of placement. If, at the start of the mVAS market, Cell Broadcast was the primary channel for promoting information and entertainment services, with only a minor share coming from wap-sites, today the primary sites for advertising are websites and mobile applications.

Also, if service providers and telecom operators worked closely together from the very beginning of the mVAS market formation, then interaction with advertising platforms would be carried out through advertising networks or advertising agencies. The presence of the DCB HUB platform, in addition to tools for traffic quality control and promotion of mVAS services, provides the possibility of direct interaction between advertising platforms, service providers and telecom operators.

Subscribers of mobile operators

Subscribers of mobile operators are not direct participants of DCB HUB, but their impact on the mVAS market and, as a result, on the platform ecosystem is difficult to overestimate. Users and consumers of mobile content are the final and key link through which all other elements of the ecosystem work, from telecom operators to advertising platforms.

Because subscribers are the ones who choose the telecom operator and contribute money to its infrastructure, loyalty indicators are critical for the operator. Subscribers decide to perform or ignore a particular target action on the service, thereby determining the difference and depth of tasks that will be performed by advertising the service.

And, of course, only a cellular subscriber using a mobile device determines which platform he will choose to visit and which of the advertising messages are most relevant to his demographic, psychological, social and other characteristics. All these nuances, from working with loyalty indexes to a wide range of parameters for targeting, are offered by the DCB HUB platform as tools for working with the audience and its participants.

How does the DC HUB work, and what are the advantages?

The business model of DCB HUB is based on the model of an industry marketplace with payment for a targeted action, which in the case of the mVAS market means a Direct Carrier Billing from the subscriber’s account when they connect to a mobile content service using one of the many existing flows on the market today.

The performance-based marketing platform Golden Goose is used as a technical platform for creating and developing a marketplace, which was initially developed according to the model of a standard CPA network, but over the past 5 years, the platform has been transformed into a DCB marketplace or DCB HUB.

Today, the platform allows advertising platforms in the self-service mode to use a wide range of tools to convert their traffic using mVAS offers. Currently, more than 500 services from at least 40 countries of the world are available in the DCB HUB advertising offer marketplace. At the same time, DCB HUB takes care of all the difficulties associated with mutual settlements between the advertiser and the advertising platform inherent in the mVAS market.

There is a large lag between the completion of the target action and the deadline for receiving payment by the service provider from the telecom operator. The DCB HUB advertising platforms have access to the daily payment service, which significantly reduces the entry threshold and expands the coverage of the sites available for the promotion of mVAS services. At the moment, the number of publishers in DCB HUB exceeds 20,000 active participants from all over the world.

An important advantage of the mVAS marketplace over the traditional CPA network with a focus on mVAS scams is the presence of self-service with the ability to independently determine the parameters of availability and cost of the target action. In addition, the pay-per-target action model used in DCB HUB for the advertiser’s side gives a lot more opportunities for promoting services within the marketplace, unlike the usual model, which implies charging a fixed fee for publishing new positions.

Unlike the standard service model of marketplaces, DCB HUB assumes responsibility for monitoring the quality of traffic delivered by advertising platforms within the ecosystem. Considering that there are more than 20,000 active advertising platforms in the system, with traffic covering more than 75 regions of the world, the presence of a developed traffic quality control system that takes into account the requirements of operators for each region is an essential element of the sustainability of the DCB HUB ecosystem.