Phonezoo Blog

In our blog post on June 27^th, we told you about some technology we implemented to determine if a song was copyrighted or not when a user creates a ringtone.  So far, we think that this technology is working well.  However, we know that a ton of ringtones on Phonezoo were created before we implemented this technology.  What about those?  What if some of them were not categorized properly? 

As we mentioned before, our goal is to respect the rights of content creators and work with them while encouraging users to create and share content with others.  So we have a responsibility to go back and take a look at all the ringtones on our site – not just the new ones. 

Today we started a process that will eventually review all the ringtones people have created.  Ringtones will be placed into two categories – those marked as copyrighted (the ones with a © next to the title) and those that are not.  Some ringtones that were not marked with a © yesterday may be marked that way today.  But don’t worry – you can still get that ringtone for your phone. 

If the ringtone is marked as copyrighted, we ask that you upload a file containing the original content before sending it to your phone.  While this may be an extra step to get some ringtones, it’s pretty straightforward.  Plus, you can edit and improve the ringtone if you like.  And we still do not charge anything for our service. 

If you are a content creator who finds your ringtone automatically marked as copyrighted and would like to make your ringtones accessible to the entire Phonezoo audience, please contact us as we will work with you to make your ringtone available.  We can also work with you to feature your content on our main page if you like. 

We’ve got a ton of respect for recording artists. And given how many people audition for “American Idol”, I think a lot of you aspire to be recording artists yourselves. So I’m sure you can appreciate why this is the right thing to do.  Feel free to share your thoughts with us.

Every day – usually several times a day – someone asks us “Is Phonezoo really free?”  And every day we cheerfully answer – “Yes!  Phonezoo does not charge you to create, store or share a ringtone.  There are no subscriptions, no monthly fees.  We make our money from advertising…”  I guess a lot of people have been burned by signing up for one of those services that ends up adding $9.99 or whatever to your phone bill.  But we aren’t like that.  We don’t charge you anything.

But we do need to pay the bills.  Running a ringtone service isn’t exactly cheap – we need to pay for servers, for bandwidth, rent, pay our engineers, buy free drinks for our cooler, etc.  So in order to move ever closer to break-even on our little enterprise, we are introducing additional types of advertising.  You already see one rectangular ad on most pages of the site.  Today we are placing a second ad at the bottom of several pages on our site.  We hope that at least once in a while, you are interested in the products and services offered by our sponsors. 

The next thing that you will notice is that there is an ad on the page on your phone where you download the ringtone (unless you are a Verizon user – you never see this web page).  This is a fairly new type of ad called a WAP ad.  These ads usually take you from one web page on your mobile phone (in this case, ours) to another.  And believe it or not, many companies are willing to pay for the privilege of reaching you, the Phonezoo user.  So we thought we’d try this out. 

We hope you understand the reason we are doing this.  And as always, we welcome your feedback.  So please drop us a line and let us know what you think.