Blyk-powered 'Orange Shots' service coming next month to Monkey customers

Now that Blyk's free-service-for-ads model has officially bitten the dust, we're starting to see new ideas come out of the woodwork from the Dutch company that might (or might not) stand a better chance of striking a survivable balance of value and profitability. Orange UK has announced that it'll be launching Orange Shots as of February 1, a program for advertisers that lets them target subscribers of its Monkey prepaid service in very specific ways. Sound familiar? Yeah, that was pretty much what Blyk had been doing all along -- difference being that they're no longer trading access to that targeted group for free minutes and texts. As far as we can tell, Orange is simply offering its subscribers the hope of getting special offers from advertisers, meaning its margins are probably going to be a lot higher here than Blyk's ever were before -- assuming Monkey customers agree to sign up, of course. For now, it's purely opt-in; let's hope it stays that way.