Jamba! / Jamster

» see jamba.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

jamba was a berlin ringtone shop founded in 2000 by the samwer brothers, in what was then kreuzberg's early startup scene. the pitch was mobile content. ringtones and wallpapers, some cheap java games too, for the mid-2000s nokia and sony-ericsson handsets that still could not run real applications. the delivery mechanism was premium-sms billing. you texted a shortcode, got the ringtone as an mms or a download link, and the fee showed up on your phone bill.

this was a whole industry in 2003-2007 and jamba was the biggest name in europe. really though, verisign bought the company in late 2004 for 270 million dollars and pushed it into the united states under the jamster brand. what happened next is that jamba lucked into the crazy frog ringtone, an animated cgi frog set to axel f from beverly hills cop, and the tv ad campaign turned into one of the most-run mobile-content ads in european tv history. the crazy frog single hit number one in multiple european markets. jamba revenue jumped from 15 million a quarter to 150 million a quarter in three quarters.

what most people did not read was the fine print. anyway, the crazy frog ad had a small box that said the ringtone was part of a weekly-billing subscription. you would text in to get one crazy frog ringtone and then get billed a few euros a week for the next several months, or until you figured out how to cancel by texting stop to a different shortcode. regulators across europe eventually forced jamba to make the subscription language larger. the ftc in the united states settled with jesta digital in 2013 over the same cramming pattern from the jamster years.

i was in university on a nokia 3310 when jamster was at its european peak. really though, the ads did not run in turkey the way they ran in germany and the uk, but the crazy frog got everywhere anyway. friends had it as an sms tone, forum signature gifs on donanimhaber cycled through frog animations for a couple of years. i never actually bought a ringtone from jamba or any other service. my ringtones were mp3 clips i cut in windows sound recorder and copied over infrared, which was how most turkish teenagers with computer-literate friends handled it.

~ the record ~

~ the verisign years ~

the 270 million dollar verisign deal in late 2004 looks strange in hindsight. verisign was a domain registry and ssl certificate company. buying a german ringtone startup was a bet on mobile content becoming a big business, which was reasonable in 2004 and became obviously wrong once the iphone shipped in 2007. for a couple of years the bet paid off. jamba revenue exploded, jamster hit us kids on nickelodeon and mtv ad breaks. the crazy frog single sold about 8 million copies globally by 2006.

verisign spun jamba into fox mobile group in a joint venture with news corp in september 2006. news corp paid roughly 188 million for 51 percent. by then the writing was on the wall. the iphone was a year away, apps were about to eat everything ringtones did, and the premium-sms billing model was under regulatory pressure in every country where the crazy frog ad had run.

~ what really happened ~

there is no clean shutdown date for jamba. anyway, jesta group bought fox mobile group from news corp in late december 2010, renamed the whole thing jesta digital, and quietly operated the jamba and jamster brands as legacy products through about 2013. jamster ceased russian operations in december 2009. the ftc cramming settlement landed in 2013. by then most of the customers had moved to iphones or android phones and were downloading actual mp3 tracks from itunes or free ringtones from android apps.

the reason there is no single death date is that the business model died before the brand did. once you could download a ringtone from an app store for free or convert one from an mp3 in a few seconds, the premium-sms weekly-subscription approach did not have any reason to exist. jamba and jamster limped on as legacy properties for a couple of years and then stopped being visible.

~ what got buried ~

the ringtone empire, mostly. jamba was the biggest brand in a category (carrier-billed mobile content) that spanned about a decade and generated billions in revenue across europe and the us, and none of it survived the smartphone transition. the crazy frog itself became a small youtube-era nostalgia character that lives on as a meme, disconnected from the ringtone business that created it.

the other thing that got buried was the samwer brothers' first big win. the samwer brothers went on to build rocket internet in 2007, which cloned zappos and groupon and about thirty other american products across europe and southeast asia. rocket internet was jamba's second act, and it is the one they are more remembered for. jamba was where they learned that european consumer distribution at scale could be done by aggressive tv advertising and hard billing, which is roughly what rocket internet became.

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