Under the Times‘ Starbucks plan, which went into effect last week but was announced today, readers will be entitled to read three articles a day from each of the News, Business, Technology and Most Emailed sections. The Times will also offer three more articles from a rotating list of other sections like Sports.

The Starbucks offer comes at a time when the Times is tightening loopholes around its so-called “metered paywall” which caps readers at 10 free articles a month.

Times spokesperson, Linda Zebian, confirmed by phone that the 15 articles available through Starbucks are in addition to the 10 free monthly ones. The catch, however, is that the Times’ chooses the free Starbucks stories. It offers them on a special landing page that looks like this:

Zebian would not provide specifics about the business arrangements between the Times and Starbucks, and only noted that the Times has long sold its newspapers through the coffee chain. Most Starbucks locations across the country provide free Wi-Fi.

The Starbucks gambit is just one way that news brands are using Wi-Fi to promote and distribute their digital content. In August, the Wall Street Journal announced a plan to provide free Wi-Fi access in more than 1300 hotspots in New York and San Francisco; the only requirement is for readers to log-in to the Journal’s website. These Wi-Fi schemes provide the news companies not only with exposure, but also allow them to glean valuable customer data such as where and when readers visit their sites.

We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Other weird things were happening back then too: People still got much of their news from television and newspapers, and they learned about major events after they had already happened.

There have been some huge shifts since 2002: Tablets and smartphones are now ubiquitous, lots of people read on their digital devices, and just about everyone is part of a social network or three. This summer is the tenth anniversary of our launch. In an effort to gain some perspective on the past decade in digital media, I’ve been reading back through paidContent’s archives — a collection of over 80,000 posts.

Since I was only a freshman in college when paidContent came to life, I often didn’t know, as I read through the stories from the early days, how things had begun or how they turned out. As I watched them unfold, I wanted to grab our readers’ arms and give them advice (“Don’t buy that Zune!” “Invest in Facebook!” “Go for the good Twitter handle now!”). But I also realized how difficult it is to predict success.

Some takeaways from my trip through the archives:  Some companies — AOL and Yahoo come to mind — have been consistently bad at predicting what consumers want. And a couple of companies, namely Apple and Amazon, have been very good at it. Also, being a native digital company helps, but it’s no guarantee of success (what up, MySpace?). And after all these years, it’s still not clear what content customers will pay for, or how much they’ll pay.

Streaming and Moviebeaming

What do analysts, CEOs and bloggers have in common? None of us can predict the future. Roger Ebert joked in 2002 that “on-demand streaming movies on the Web, like HDTV, are five years in the future — and will be for at least another 10 years.”

If Disney’s Moviebeam had been the only game in town, Ebert probably would have been right. When it launched in three cities in 2003, customers paid $6.99 a month to use a device that could hold 100 movies and plugged into the back of a TV set. They also had to pay for each movie they watched– billing was done via the phone line. The company went through various unsuccessful iterations before India’s Valuable Group bought it in 2008. It was never heard from again.

Netflix almost went down the same road. It had a plan to release a Moviebeam-like “proprietary set-top box with an Internet connection that could download movies overnight.” But instead, it decided to forge ahead with streaming — starting with a complicated “quota hours” system in 2007 and moving to unlimited streaming in 2008. By 2010, the majority of subscribers were streaming something, and the company began offering streaming-only subscriptions, though CEO Reed Hastings said that same year that the company would keep shipping DVDs until 2030. (We’ll see about that.)

ABC was the first network to sell episodes of its shows on iTunes, back in 2006, and to stream shows free with ads on ABC.com — and later on AOL. But by the time premium subscription service Hulu Plus launched in 2010, the platforms getting the attention were devices with built-in access, like Internet-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, and tablets.

Return of the living dead

Speaking of AOL: It’s something of a miracle that the company still exists. In 2000, when it merged with Time Warner, it was valued at $350 billion, and the next year, more than 24 million people in the U.S. were paying for its Internet access service. By the end of last year, that number had dwindled to just 3.3 million subscribers. Here’s a quick recap of some of AOL’s miscues over the years:

• AOL Voicemail ($5.95 per month)
• A teen service called Red (featuring “a talking head—using the image of an actual employee—that uses software to answer users’ questions”)
• A digital music partnership with Burger King
• A reality show called “Gold Rush”
• Social networking site AIM Pages
• Going free
• The hyperlocal Patch blogs

Though AOL was once a high flier, no other company ever liked it quite enough to buy it. Google bought a five-percent, $1 billion stake in AOL in 2005, leading analysts to wonder if Microsoft missed out. That resulted in a $726 million writedown in 2009. Time Warner bought back Google’s stake and finally spun off “the albatross” in December 2009.  AOL is still promising a bounceback. “The executive team expects a profitable content business by next year,” CEO Tim Armstrong said in May 2011.

Yahoo hasn’t fared much better. The company launched Yahoo Platinum in 2003; for $9.95 a month, subscribers got access to audio and videos.  The program was dead by October of that same year. It later tried a Twitter-wannabe microblogging service (“Meme…where you share everything that you find that’s interesting,”). Perhaps the smartest move Yahoo ever made was not buying AOL.

Where did these companies go wrong? In 2010, former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin pondered that question in an interview with the New York Times . The AOL-Time Warner deal was “undone by the Internet itself,” he said. “I think it’s something that no one could have foreseen, and to this day, whether Apple is going to dominate entertainment or whether Amazon is going to dominate publishing, all the old business plans are out the window. How do you get paid for content?”

Know what’s cool? A billion dollars

In 2006, an RBC Capital analyst estimated that a certain social networking company would be worth $15 billion in a few years, based on “raw, unprecedented user/usage growth.”

Six years later, Facebook went public with a valuation of $104 billion. Too bad the analyst wasn’t talking about Facebook but about MySpace. The social networking company that Rupert Murdoch acquired for $580 million in 2005 sold for just $35 million in 2011.

Why did Facebook soar while MySpace — and other social networking services like Friendster — sank? It allowed people to build real connections using their actual personal information, and rolled out a product that was ready to scale and had good technology. Other companies realized sharing was important too — in 2005, Yahoo SVP Jeff Weiner called sharing “the next chapter of the World Wide Web” — but Facebook was able to implement it in a way that kept users coming back. The site surpassed Yahoo and AOL for “stickiness” in 2009, when Nielsen found users spending an average of four hours and thirty-nine minutes a month on Facebook.

Social has already disrupted some industries — witness the rise of Twitter and the way it has changed the way news is reported, with stories like Osama Bin Laden’s assassination breaking there first. In a sign of the importance of these emerging platforms, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and New York Times are launching “Everywhere” initiatives to deliver news to readers where they are already hanging out.

Fast food and music don’t mix

Hard to believe it now, but there was real skepticism that iTunes’ 99-cent songs would be able to compete with peer-to-peer file-sharing services. “According to academics who’ve studied the economics of digital music distribution,” we wrote in 2003, the year iTunes launched, “the cost still seems too high to attract users of peer-to-peer file trading services.” The piece cited an economist who believed “the appropriate price of a downloaded song is 18 cents.” In fact, Real Networks dropped its song prices to $0.49 in an attempt to compete against Apple.

In the end, consumers choose selection and convenience over P2P networks. We called iTunes “a kickstart for the micropayments industry.” Was it? While Steve Jobs said in 2004 that Apple wouldn’t hit its one-year, 100 million songs downloaded goal, global digital music sales crossed $1.1 billion in 2006. In April 2008, Apple surpassed Walmart  as the largest music seller in the United States.

The company that arguably started the digital music revolution — Napster — didn’t survive. Once it no longer offered “free,” it was done, though it tried to reincarnate itself: launching a mobile music service, “Napster To Go,” with AT&T in 2004 (the one smartphone that supported it could hold up to 6 songs), partnering with Circuit City on a digital music store, getting itself acquired by Best Buy in 2008 ,and then being bought back by Rhapsody in 2011. Unfortunately, Rhapsody was already losing out to newer (and free) streaming services like Pandora and Spotify.

The partnerships with Circuit City and Best Buy, though, were probably the kiss of death. One of the big trends of the past 10 years has been brick-and-mortar retail stores’ consistent failure to compete effectively against digital-native companies. Best Buy wasn’t the only retailer to try to crack the digital-content business — and fail: Target and Sears both took a shot. And McDonald’s sold digital content over its WiFi network and even tried DVD rentals in its restaurants.

Do you like the feel of paper?

Just as digital music didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPod, the ebook revolution didn’t take place until the arrival of the Kindle. In paidContent’s early years, ebooks were written off as a failure in part because publishers couldn’t figure out what to do with DRM. (In 2003, “temporary electronic ink” that would disappear after a few months was floated as a possible solution.) Barnes & Noble decided to stop selling ebooks in 2003, and Yahoo stopped selling them in 2004.

Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were pushing forward. Google launched Google Print – now called Google Book Search, and still besieged by lawsuits seven years later. Amazon tested two now-defunct programs: Amazon Pages, which allowed customers to buy access to digital copies of select pages from books, and Amazon Upgrade, which bundled print books with online access to the complete work.

Customers weren’t biting. Then Amazon came out with the Kindle in 2007 for $399. Less than two years later, Amazon was selling more Kindle books than print books, and ebooks now make up over 20 percent of some big-six publishers’ sales. Barnes & Noble has had some success with its Nook e-reader and digital bookstore, but bankrupt Borders shuttered all its stores in 2011. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five big publishers for allegedly colluding to set e-book prices drags on.

Good thing Steve Jobs looked beyond ringtones

A Forbes survey back in 2002 found that “business professionals” would be willing to pay for “news content to be delivered to their cellular devices,” and some media companies tried early mobile experiments. Verizon offered a cell phone version of the Yellow Pages — which, at $19.95 per year, gained 15,000 subscribers in three months. But starting in 2004, everyone decided the future was in ringtones. A $4 billion global business by the end of the year, one company projected.

So, so many ringtones. You could buy them from Rolling Stone or from an ATM-like device called E2Go. A fall 2004 marketing campaign let you mix your own ringtones on Levi’s website. Billboard launched a top ringtones chart.

Could ringtones “prove to be a passing fad”? we wondered late in 2004. Luckily, yes — a new technology came along to shake up the mobile market. No, it wasn’t the $500 ESPN phone, but the iPhone, which came out in 2007. And by opening its platform up to third-party app developers, Apple got users ready for its next ecosystem-changing device, the iPad, in 2010.

Monetizing mobile

Advertising has always been a fuzzy business — how exactly do you measure engagement and success? Well, that’s still the big debate about advertising in the digital era.  ”If here’s anything that’s really holding back ad spending on the web, it’s the lack of good measurements,” Tim Armstrong, then Google’s VP of national sales, said in 2007.

Mobile advertising has also faced obstacles. In 2006, mobile carriers began allowing advertising despite fears of annoying customers. Customers were indeed annoyed – 79 percent of them found mobile advertising annoying, according to a 2007 Forrester study — but they could “see the potential benefits of mobile advertising and marketing to themselves,” particularly if they could get a useful special offer or coupon.

Further complicating matters for advertisers: The smartphone market is fragmented among different brands — marketers don’t want to spend the money to create different ads for Android and iOS — and there are two mobile ad universes: mobile browser and apps.

Nevertheless, mobile advertising has gained ground, crossing  $1 billion in the U.S. for the first time in 2011, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, totaling $1.6 billion for the year.

The next opportunity is social media advertising. And once again, it will be a challenge to figure out some standardized metrics. What’s a retweet worth, anyways?

Back to where we all began

Though micropayments worked well for music when Apple launched iTunes, the path to payments for written content has been rockier. In 2004, we wrote that “micropayments today are still characterized by a large number of competing transaction types” – including direct-to-bill, merchant aggregation, prepaid accounts and direct transfer – and “each of these face the current incumbent in digital content distribution: the flat-fee subscription model.”

Eight years later, it appears that the subscription model has won out. The iPad opened the door for magazine and newspaper publishers to create new revenue selling content on that platform, but the results have been mixed. When Rupert Murdoch’s “The Daily” iPad newspaper launched in early 2011, the company called it “the model for how stories are told and consumed.” We wrote, “The bet here is that while consumers are less and less likely to reach into their pocket for a few quarters to buy a newspaper, they might not care about the 14 cents on their credit card for a copy of an e-newspaper.” A year and a half later, The Daily has over 100,000 paying subscribers — but it’s living on borrowed time and may not get through the five years its publisher has said it needs to break even.

Writing for the web, of course, has been around for awhile. At the beginning of the decade, blogging was called “nanopublishing,” and the question was how blogs could support themselves doing it. All sorts of models have arisen. For example, Gawker tried a licensing deal with Yahoo, but that relationship ended a year later. The deal “garnered way more attention than we expected, but less traffic,” Gawker CEO Nick Denton said in 2006.

Some bloggers have stayed independent and make a living from advertising (or from their day job); others write their blogs under a newspaper, website or larger magazine’s umbrella — see the Dish’s Andrew Sullivan, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, WaPo’s Ezra Klein. Or, they go to work for the Huffington Post!

Magazine companies have grappled with whether to bundle digital editions with print subscriptions or charge for them separately. Time Inc. — which first put digital editions of its magazines behind AOL’s paywall in 2003 — started out charging separately, but today Time Inc. and Condé Nast print subscribers get the digital edition free. Hearst, meanwhile, is charging separately, and it said its digital business in the U.S. became “solidly profitable” for the first time in 2011.

Could there ever be a Netflix for magazines? Time tried it for print versions with its 2008 Maghound service. It failed, due to a lack of marketing and reader interest. Magazine publishers are trying again with joint venture Next Issue Media.

Many newspaper publishers, most notably the New York Times, tried paywalls at the start of the decade and then abandoned them – only to return to the model in the past couple years.  In its most recent earnings report, the NYT said it has 454,000 digital subscribers. Is that enough to sustain the newspaper in its 21st-century transition?  Probably the best answer to that came from  Vivian Schiller. But it was in response not to the NYT’s recent digital subscriber numbers, but to the NYT’s decision in 2004 to close the paper’s first paywall, known as TimesSelect. Schiller, then the SVP and general manager of NYTimes.com, was asked whether TimesSelect had worked.  “It did work,” she said. “It’s just a matter of as compared to what.”

Birthday cake photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Robyn Mackenzie].

TV photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Somchai Buddha].

Zombie hand photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [lineartestpilot].

Piggybank photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [cardiae]

Fast food photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [Sergio Martinez].

Book photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [TrotzOlga].

Ringtones and apps photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [violetkaipa].

Cash register photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [titelio].

Magazines photo courtesy of Shutterstock user [bernashafo].

Starbucks launched the “Indivisible” collection — a coffee blend, branded tumblers and mugs — in its stores in mid-June and makes a donation to the Create Jobs for USA fund every time an “Indivisible” item is purchased. Now the campaign is extending to social media in a special Fourth of July initiative. Schultz wrote yesterday on the company’s blog:

I invite you to share your view of America, and how we can all put citizenship over partisanship. On Instagram, post a photo of the America we all need to see. On Twitter, provide a link to an innovative idea. Blog about who’s making a difference in your community; or on YouTube, share how you made your American Dream come true. No matter where you post, if you use the tag #INDIVISIBLE, Starbucks will do its part to collect and amplify your voices.

That’s a little vague. Is it enough to get consumers excited? So far, #indivisible isn’t a trending topic on Twitter, but a search today reveals a few #indivisible tweets an hour. Posting to Instagram is interrupted by the fact that Instagram is down in a mass power outage. Still, we have a few days to go until July 4. On that day, “To spark the conversation in our stores, your local Starbucks will proudly serve everyone a free tall hot brewed coffee on the Fourth of July.” It’s yet to be seen whether the conversation that day will focus on job creation and nonpartisanship — or whether people will just be wondering why they didn’t get an iced coffee instead.

If there’s one question on which much of Facebook’s $60-billion market valuation hangs, it is whether the kind of “social advertising” the giant network offers to brands actually works or not — in other words, whether having fans and social discussion around a product translates into actual measurable sales. Facebook has now released some actual data from comScore that it says proves the value of building up a fan base on its platform, since doing so appears to increase the likelihood that a user will buy something later. But will the research convince advertisers to devote more time and money to Facebook’s social campaigns? And if so, how much of that will benefit Facebook directly?

The comScore study, which is called “The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works,” (PDF download available here) is the second in a series the web-analytics firm has done with Facebook. The first report came out last July, and argued that brands using the social network need to do more than simply build up a large fan base — they need to use a combination of paid and “earned” media (that is, content that is shared voluntarily by users) to promote whatever marketing message they are focusing on. The latest report is an extension of that case, with some statistical database on what Starbucks and Target have seen from their Facebook campaigns.

Fans of a brand buy more, and so do their friends

According to comScore, Starbucks saw a “statistically significant” improvement in purchasing behavior in its stores in the weeks following exposure to promotional content on Facebook. Perhaps most important of all, the analytics firm said this behavior was seen not just among those who were already fans of the brand on the social network, but also among friends of those fans — evidence of what comScore called a “latent branding impact.” The same kind of impact was seen in a study of buying behavior at Target stores, comScore said.

In a nutshell, the report says that by the fourth week following the exposure of fans and friends of fans to certain advertising content — whether in a “sponsored story” or some other social ad format — the test group’s purchasing rate of 2.12 percent was a little over half a percentage point higher than the control groups’ rate. According to comScore, that means the social advertising on Facebook drove an increase in actual sales of almost 40 percent.

As Peter Kafka of All Things Digital notes, the comScore research is a bit of a double-edged sword for Facebook, since it shows that “earned media” — that is, the kind of social sharing that in many cases brands don’t even have to pay for — can generate a substantial bump in sales all by itself, without the need for traditional display ads. Theoretically, that’s the kind of ammunition brands like General Motors could use to justify dropping their ad spending on Facebook and relying on social sharing of their marketing content instead.

Facebook display ads work too, says comScore

One of the comScore study’s conclusions seems to be aimed directly at this idea — and also at critics who question whether Facebook’s paid ads are effective when the click-through rates on them are so low (even lower than the rates on generic web advertising). The report notes that an analysis of the data showed “statistically significant” increases in both online and in-store purchasing for a major retailer after exposure to display ads, despite the lack of clicks, and that this “highlights the importance of using view-through display ad effectiveness in a medium where click-through rates are known to be lower than average.”

Facebook’s Brad Smallwood, head of measurement and insight for the social network, was more blunt in a comment to the Wall Street Journal about the results of the comScore research, saying it proved that “It’s a myth that Facebook advertising doesn’t work.” The Journal also noted that the quiet period following its initial stock offering has ended, so Facebook is now able to respond to some of the criticisms that arose during the IPO roadshow, and the comScore study is clearly part of that effort.

One thing the study also reinforces is just how much advertisers are betting on Facebook: according to comScore’s analysis, more than 15 percent of all U.S. online display ads were “socially enabled,” meaning they contained a message asking viewers to “like” or follow the brand or the campaign on Facebook. That’s almost double the number of ads that contained those kinds of messages in November of last year, the report said. That kind of bet is what drove Salesforce to spend close to a billion dollars to buy Buddy Media, which specializes in managing Facebook pages and social campaigns.

“After Friday Night Lights” is regularly priced at $2.99, but when it was selected as a Starbucks Pick of the Week, customers could grab a card with a redeemable iTunes code from Starbucks stores, making the book free.

At that point, the New York Times reports:

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

Byliner elaborated to me:

Our core belief is that great writing has value. So when Amazon chose to set the price of Buzz Bissinger’s After Friday Night Lights to $0.00 in response to a Starbucks and Apple promotion, we removed Buzz’s story from Amazon for the week of the promotion. We did so because we felt that a price of zero was disrespectful to Buzz and antithetical to what we’re about. On May 1, After Friday Night Lights will again be available at Amazon, priced at $2.99–the same price it carries at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and other digital stores.

According to the NYT article, when Byliner told Amazon about the Starbucks promotion, Amazon warned Byliner that this “might” happen. And what do you know — it did.

Amazon gave me the following statement:

We always try to provide the lowest price possible for customers, and we don’t believe we should make our customers pay for an e-book they can get for free elsewhere due to a pricing promotion. Our customers are huge fans of Buzz Bissinger’s work, and we hope and expect that Byliner will enable us to sell “After Friday Night Lights” again on May 1.

And yes, it has long been Amazon’s policy to match e-book prices on other sites. The company has done so in error before, but this time it wasn’t a mistake.

Presumably Amazon will do the same thing the next time an e-book is chosen as a Starbucks Pick of the Week. (It’s not an e-book every week, but it is sometimes. Random House’s “The Night Circus” was chosen last September, and I don’t think that Amazon dropped the price to $0 then, but it seems clear that that’s the new policy.)

This means authors will have to make the decision: Will they gain more new readers and sales by having their book promoted in Starbucks (for which they are also paid a royalty on each copy downloaded) — or will the sales lost through Amazon that week outweigh any Starbucks benefit? Correction: Starbucks tells me: “We do not compensate authors or other Content Providers for downloads, as content providers willingly waive royalties for the marketing exposure they receive through the Pick of the Week program.”

And publishers will have to decide whether, like Byliner, they then pull the $0 book from Amazon…or wait it out and hope the week’s over soon.

The patents in question are owned by Maxim Integrated, a California semiconductor company, and describe basic mobile payment actions. For instance, US Patent 5949880 was issued in 1997 and describes a method:

for enabling a user to fill a portable module with a cash equivalent and to spend the cash equivalent at a variety of locations

The company is also asserting three other patents against the defendants, including one from 2000 in which an:

electronic module is capable of passing information back and forth between a service provider’s equipment via a secure, encrypted technique so that money and other valuable data can be securely passed electronically. The module is capable of being programmed, keeping track of real time, recording transactions for later review, and creating encryption key pairs.

The activities described in the patents seem to encompass activities inherent to any mobile payments operation. Moreover, Maxim is asserting them across different platforms. In its complaints, it singles out apps like “Expedia Hotels for Android” and “Capital One Mobile Banking for Android” in addition to iPhone and iPad apps.

Maxim is a public company that reported $2.5 billion in 2011 revenues. A spokeswoman said it has a “strong presence” in smart phones and tablets and that 30% of its chip business is consumer facing. The company acquired the patents when it bought Dallas Semiconductor in 2001.

The company filed the three lawsuits last week in federal court in East Texas. The Maxim spokeswoman said she could not immediately confirm if the company was going to sue other firms that offer mobile payment options.

Starbucks was an early adopter of mobile payments and attracted buzz last year for its app which allows people to pay for coffee and collect rewards by holding their phone up to an in-score scanner.

Starbucks Mobile Payment Patent case

Starbucks launched its “pick of the week” program for a free song on iTunes in 2008, and has now expanded its partnership with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to include extended excerpts of books from the iBookstore, apps and TV episodes. Visitors to one of Starbucks’ 8500 stores can pick up a card at the register.

The Night Circus, published by Random House’s Doubleday imprint has already received a huge amount of publicity in advance of its official publication date, which was yesterday. The first print run was for 150,000 copies. Summit Entertainment, which produced the Twilight films, bought the film rights, and foreign rights have been sold in thirty countries. Booksellers are holding publicity events with contortionists, Tarot card readers and magicians, according to the WSJ.

In other words, this isn’t exactly a book that’s lacking for publicity. It is already at #17 on Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list, #9 on the Nook bestseller list and #7 on the Apple iBookstore bestseller list. Starbucks clearly wanted to choose a splashy title for its first e-book pick of the week.

I’ve asked Doubleday how the book was chosen and I will update the post when I hear back.

Advertising is one of the fastest-growing mobile services around: Gartner forecasts that mobile ads will bring in more than $20.6 billion in annual revenues worldwide by 2015, compared to $3.3 billion in 2011, as operators, Internet giants, agencies and dozens of specialized mobile ad outfits all vie for a piece of the pie. But even so, that number is tiny compared to tens of billions of dollars that mobile operators collectively make from basic offerings like voice, text and data plans on a quarterly basis.

Still, the promise of generating even more revenue from customers — and the desire to make sure the likes of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) do not control the game — has continued to drive operators to mobile advertising to try their luck.

O2 says that the six million users signed up to O2 More works out to more than the number of people who tuned in to the premier episode of this year’s Big Brother series (5.1 million), and more than the circulation of the News Corp-owned Sun (2.8 million), the country’s biggest newspaper.

O2 has attracted some high-profile advertisers for the platform, too. They include Starbucks (NSDQ: SBUX), McDonalds and consumer-goods giant Unilever. A lot of the ads on O2 More are delivered to users using one of the least fancy features on the phone — messaging — which gets turned into a more enhanced service when combined with newer technologies like location-aware targeting and video.

In fact, O2 claims that part of its success with the service so far has been down to its targeting technique: those who opt in for the service are asked about their preferences, and then these are combined up with data that O2 keeps on users, such as phone usage and location (especially location). Together these are used to deliver what O2 calls “highly personalized” ads.

“Most forms of mobile marketing are still trying to replicate the web with banners and those kinds of formats,” Shaun Gregory, MD of O2 Media, told mocoNews. He claims that O2 offers an “intelligent conversation” with customers. “Everything that is delivered to customers is relevant to them,” he says.

Gregory says that a campaign earlier this year for Starbucks sent out nearly 300,000 coupons to all opted-in O2 users within half a mile of a Staurbucks — it was for 50p off a Via instant coffee — and 14 percent of users redeemed the coupons, and in all 93 percent said later that they recalled the ad.

While O2 More has been going for nearly two years, it now looks like O2 is starting to build out more services around the basic marketing platform. In August, the company launched a new service, Priority Moments, which offers users Groupon-style deals on selected services and goods as a part of the marketing service.

Gregory says that another enhancement that will be in place by the end of this year is billing: customers will be able to redeem that same Starbucks coupon but make the payment directly with their devices. Ditto integration of O2 More with the company’s free, UK-wide WiFi effort.

There is also the prospect of extending O2 More to other operators in the Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) footprint: that, at least, is the promise of Telefonica Digital, the new initiative announced last week that will bring together all of Telefonica’s “new services” to look at how best to extend them throughout the whole operation.

One down side here is that O2 is not yet releasing any numbers on revenues from these marketing services — and definitely no figures on whether they are turning a profit. That lack of transparency leads one to wonder if the company is making much at all out of this. Reach can be a deceptive metric in the mobile advertising game: it doesn’t amount to much if advertisers are not also in play. O2 More may have more eyeballs than Big Brother, but it only amounts to something if enough advertisers care.

Schultz went public three weeks ago with his decision not to donate money to any campaigns and his appeal to fellow business leaders to follow suit. AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong was among the 100 or so CEOs who quickly agreed. Since then, Schultz has gone into full campaign mode in his campaign against political business as usual, making TV appearances and launching a “take the pledge” effort at http://www.upwardspiral2011.org and aimed at getting both CEOs and other donors to take the pledge.

Today’s e-mail blast touts the next step: “a national call-in conversation on Tuesday September 6th hosted by ‘No Labels.’ a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fostering cooperative and more effective government.”

Click on the Upward Spiral link and you can either RSVP or “take the pledge.” That takes you to a Facebook page describing the “platform for action” where you can pledge not to donate and/or to hire. So far it stands at 2,047 promising not to donate — which may sound like a small number but can reflect a lot of money that usually goes to candidates — and 308 pledging to hire.

I wanted to know more but when I clicked on the “tell me more” button I rebelled at all the Facebook permissions it took to get there. I should be able to find out more about an effort like this without giving up privacy.

That brings me back in a way to the beginning. I’m not offended by today’s e-mail from Howard Schultz. He has a powerful consumer pulpit and a message he thinks is important enough to use all of his resources to get across. It’s in keeping with the emphasis Starbucks has had on responsible giving for many years and other efforts.

But I probably wouldn’t feel ok if it were the head of another public company — or any company — using my permission for a consumer relationship to send messages about, say, a proposition to ban gay marriage or to back a specific candidate. How about an opt in for any info that isn’t directly related to the company’s goods and services?

» Motorola/Microsoft: Motorola (NYSE: MMI) Mobility gets a setback in a patent infringement case being brought against it by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). (via Florian Mueller)

» Motorola: The banker William Hambrecht is leaving the board of directors at Motorola Mobility. (via Washington Post)

» Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) location lawsuit: Samsung is not the only challenge Apple is facing in Korea. Kim Hyung-Suk, a lawyer in Seoul, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple over location tracking. The suit, with 27,000 consumers behind it, is the second time Hyung-Suk has gone up against Apple for collecting location data. The first time, he was paid $930 as a settlement, which could potentially mean a $25 million settlement for Apple if applied to the suit filed yesterday. (via Bloomberg)

» PC sales: A counterpoint to the huge growth we’ve seen in mobile and specifically smartphones… Gartner says the Western European PC market declined by 19 percent in Q2 2011; the only maker to buck the trend was Apple, whose Mac line of products saw growth of 0.5 percent. (via Gartner)

» Orange iPad: Good news for Apple in Europe — an example of how it is getting a leg up in distribution in Europe. France Telecom’s mobile operator Orange has extended the number of countries where it sells the iPad 2 to Austria, Belgium, Spain, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland. Previously, the operator had only distributed it, with options including subsidized plans, in France and the UK. (via Orange)

» Starbucks: The coffee chain looks like it is expanding its mobile content rewards campaign — it is now offering selected premium apps for free as part of its “Pick of the Week” scheme for customers in the U.S. (via CNET)

» Jumptap: The mobile ad company has partnered with four “offline” data collectors: Acxiom, Datalogix, Polk, and TARGUSinfo, which collect data like offline purchase behavior, to integrate their information to provide more targeted advertising to consumers. (via Jumptap)

» Symbian: Nokia (NYSE: NOK) has made its latest update to Symbian, “Anna,” available for download. (via Nokia)