Club Nokia

» see club.nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nokia was the phone in Turkey for most of the 2000s, and almost none of the money spent around a Nokia phone reached Nokia after the handset itself. It reached the operator. Ringtones and screen logos were sold through SMS shortcodes advertised on television, you texted a code and the charge appeared on your bill, and the manufacturer had no part in that transaction whatsoever. Club Nokia was Nokia trying to have a part in it, and the reason I never once ran into it is the same reason it failed.

It began in 1997 as something nobody could object to, a website with manuals and support information for people who had bought a Nokia. In 1999 it became a service you could reach over WAP or on the web, and it started selling. Extra levels for the game Space Impact came first, and a licensing deal with EMI in august 2000 turned it into a ringtone shop. Picture messaging had already launched through it in Finland in december 1999, and a deal with Amazon let you buy books off a WAP phone, which in 2000 was closer to performance art than to commerce.

You paid with credits. Credits came from an authorized Nokia dealer, in person, which sounds absurd now and made complete sense in a world where hardly anybody had a card they could use online. By november 2001 more than ten million people had joined and Nokia was forecasting a billion euros of annual revenue from it by 2004. On paper it had invented the mobile content business two years before anyone else was ready for it. On paper is where that stayed.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

The EMI deal was the mistake, and it was a mistake purely because of who Nokia's actual customers were. Nokia did not sell phones to people. It sold phones in volume to carriers, who subsidized them and handed them to people. Those same carriers ran branded portals whose entire revenue in 2001 came from ringtones. Club Nokia was a supplier competing with its own distributors over the one product line the distributors were making money on.

Operators never had to sue over something like that. They only had to mention, during a meeting about next year's handset volumes, that the relationship felt different lately. Nokia held the line for three years and then folded.

~ the postmortem ~

On 20 september 2004 The Register reported that Nokia was exiting ringtones. The official line was that it had never been chasing market share, that the site existed only to be a "market maker" showing Nokia owners what their new phones could do. Vodafone and T-Mobile welcomed the retreat. Club Nokia carried on as a loyalty and news portal, which is a courteous description of a brand with nothing left to sell, and in late 2007 it was renamed My Nokia and the club was finished.

Nokia went back to the same idea and lost with it every time. Mosh arrived in 2007, then the Ovi Store two years after that. Each attempt was better built than Club Nokia and each hit the same wall, until Apple walked straight through the wall by not needing carriers in the first place.

~ what survived ~

Apple did in 2008 what Nokia had been forbidden to do in 2001, and the difference was leverage rather than technology. AT&T needed the iPhone more than Apple needed AT&T. Nokia was never once in that position despite selling more phones than anybody on earth, and Club Nokia is where you can see it most plainly. A company that shipped hundreds of millions of handsets a year could not sell the people holding them a ringtone.

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