Will free traffic service become the next “free lunch”?

Earlier this year, Dan Check, vice president of technology at Slate, a well-known online magazine, was looking for ways to increase traffic to the magazine's podcast. After some brainstorming, he decided to try paying users.

Slate told users who might be interested in the service that the magazine's podcasts would not increase their data costs. In the end, about 61% of users were willing to give it a try.

“I was blown away by the results of this approach,” said Mr. Chek, who began the experiment two weeks ago with the help of a company called DataMi. “People are really, really sensitive to using data.”

AT&T launched a program earlier this year that lets companies pay for the use of its services, and it seemed likely that it would get some of the traffic generated by popular sites like YouTube and Facebook .

Hershey Co., Hotels.com and eBay -owned StubHub are participating in the program, paying for or providing bonus data usage when people visit their sites and sign up for the test.

So far, the service is still in the testing phase. But if the trial is successful, it will solve a big problem for operators. The telecom industry hopes to maintain revenue growth by increasing data usage, but consumers have always been concerned about data usage and are afraid that using too much data will lead to increased expenses.

The service has also attracted the attention of government regulators, who worry that it could give deep-pocketed companies an unfair advantage over their competition.

In 2013, the average American household spent $913 on phone service, a 50% increase from 2007. According to statistics, one in five American households spend more than $1,400 on phone service. Verizon Communications, an operator, said on Tuesday that the average monthly mobile phone bill has reached $161.24, a 3.5% increase from last year.

These added costs mean that companies that want to promote their products or services on mobile devices will have to bear a heavier burden: not only must they convince potential users of the idea, but they must also convince users that their data plans are worth trying.

A new service called Freeway, announced this week, allows AT&T smartphone users to access certain websites, including StubHub.com and Expedia.com, without charging for the data they use to visit those sites.

The app was developed by a Seattle company called Syntonic, and users of the app can also watch trailers for the movie "Frank vs. God," and the related traffic generated is of course free.

David Doctorow, Expedia's senior vice president of global marketing, said paying for users' data usage helps the site connect with users, especially when they are traveling or are very sensitive to data usage.

"We think sponsored data is something that's worth looking at because it's so relevant to business travel," Doctorow said.

Kickbit, which launched last year and allows smartphone users with prepaid plans to get a large amount of data when signing up for a new service, recently announced it will give users a special 200MB of data that can be used at any time.

Kickbit has been downloaded 100,000 times from the Google Play store . In return for paying attention to the company's brand, Aquto's users can get tens of thousands of gigabytes of free traffic each month, equivalent to hundreds of hours of high-definition movie traffic, said Susie Kim Riley, Aquto's chief executive.

The plans take advantage of changing trends in Americans' smartphone usage, which is increasingly being used for entertainment and shopping.

Break.com, a youth-oriented video joke site that gets 50 million monthly visitors and 14.5 million hours of user time a month on its mobile site and app, plans to participate in a trial starting next week that will allow AT&T customers to use its app without using data.

Paying for this traffic is a big deal. Matt Diamond, CEO of Defy Media, which operates Break.com, said the economic model is only attractive if the number of visitors increases.

“If people aren’t spending more time on the site and in the app, then we’re just incurring costs that we wouldn’t have to incur otherwise,” Diamond said.

Advertisers are cautiously optimistic about this model. Jeff Malmad, director of North American mobile business at global marketing agency Mindshare, said that paying for users' data traffic can attract consumers, but it will also increase the cost of mobile marketing.

“Ultimately we’ll have to watch these users and see if they spend more time on the service and sign up for podcasts,” Slate’s Checker said. “Whether they spend more time on the service is still unknown, but we know that users who ignore the new service are definitely not going to spend more time on the service.”

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.