Youmint: How refreshingly unoriginal

The site claims: “YouMint is a unique social utility that connects you with people around you”.

So what is their “unique” concept? You register with their site, invite friends to register, grow your network. Then you receive ads on your mobile, you not only get paid for these ads; you also get paid when someone in your network receives an ad.

Sounds familiar? Yes, around 6 months back, mGinger started this business model in India. Paying consumers for seeing ads was not something entirely new. But what mGinger brought into Indian market is this concept of incentivizing the users for building a network.

Within 2 months of the launch of mGinger, many other such sites came up, claiming to do exactly the same thing. Even the names of these sites were just a minor variation of mGinger. Some of these folks even wrote blogs claiming that mGinger was fake (I’m not going to mention the names or provide any links here. Those guys don’t deserve any publicity). They tried to “steal” users from mGinger by offering to pay more for each ad. Unsurprisingly, most of these guys vanished after a while; whereas mGinger still continues to get mentioned in the press. (For example here, here and here)

It’s not surprising in business world to see people blindly copying others. But you would expect these folks to at least think about a decent strategy before challenging the existing players. Take the example of Youmint now. Here are the 3 things they are promising. Let’s see how “unique” and clever their strategy is.

1) Get paid when you or your network receive Ads.

This is the crux of the business model (you’ll see why) and it’s a direct copy of mGinger concept. As per Youmint
- What you get each time you get a promo SMS – Rs 0.20
- What you get when a friend you referred get a promo – Rs 0.10
- What you get when a friend of the friend you referred gets a promo – Rs 0.05

They don’t even bother to offer a different amount.

And in the house rules section, they mention
“And you need to have a minimum of Rs 300 in your account for us to cut you a cheque”

The “Rs. 300” part is again taken from mGinger.

Ask these guys, why they chose these numbers, I’m sure they won’t have a convincing answer.


2) Get paid when your referrals join Youmint.

Ah! Something new here. But as you’ll realize quickly, the money you get from this is not even going to buy you a decent meal. If you invite 20 friends and each of them, in turn, invite 20 other (a highly optimistic scenario) you’ll get only one time payment of Rs 110. Take a more realistic estimate. You invite 10 friends and each of them in turn invite 10 others, you’ll end up getting Rs 30 only.

So, on the face of it, even though Youmint looks to be doing something different, the users will soon realize that this is merely a window dressing.

3) Send “Free SMS” to your network.

mGinger has cleverly avoided stepping into any areas that would be seen as a threat to the telecom providers. Unfortunately, Youmint seem to have ignored the angle. If you allow, your users to send free SMS, you are cutting the revenue of the mobile service providers.
I don’t think they are going to take this lightly.

Most of these services buy bulk SMS packs from MSPs. So one SMS might cost them almost half of what it costs the regular users. What Youmint is trying to do is to get the advertisers sponsor these SMSs. Advertisers would be willing to do this, because the cost of the SMS is already much lower; whereas they perhaps would be unwilling to sponsor a regular SMS. I think we can guess the reaction of the MSPs.

In the end, one more point to these guys. Here is what they have mentioned in the FAQ section

“So basically, you make enough to at least cover your mobile bill (and perhaps a coffee for us for coming up with this great idea!)”

Guys, isn’t it bad enough that you are just blatantly copying someone’s idea, do you now have to go around claiming that you came up with it in the first place? Lets hope you guys survive long enough to have that coffee though.