You couldn't dream up a bigger name of blue chip venture and strategic investors ranging from MTV Networks to Highland Capital Partners, but even the name brand financiers couldn't help save a business model that at the end of the day just doesn't make a whole hell a lot of sense. I mean, come on, if the king of brand marketers (I am talking about ESPN, of course) can't get it done, how could an upstart do it? Well it turns out that even after raising gobs, and I mean gobs of capital, $360 million to be exact, mobile virtual network operator Amp'd Mobile very quietly filed Chapter 11 papers last week. Amp'd claims to have upwards of 200,000 customers which based on the amount of capital they raised works out to a customer acquisition cost of $1,800 per customer. But really, that isn't a fair metric. The costs that Amp'd was unable to control were related to their infrastructure as opposed to just pure marketing costs. How did things get so bad so quick? I remember getting a blast email from someone representing them a couple of months ago touting their "fast growing" subscriber base and their unique content offerings headlined by their "Lil Bush" cartoon series. To be frank, we never were able to understand who their customer base consisted of, since they never showed up on our radar when tracking the youth market's cell phone service providers.
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