We power SMS campaigns via our TextMe product (http://textme.net). In our experience premium SMS (charging someone’s bill) is a waste of time for all and is a dead end. The carriers take 40-50% of the revenue, the channel is super heavily regulated (and widely litigated), and riddled with chargebacks since people tend to pull out a WTF? when they see their bill, forgetting that they even participated in the first place. It also just feels dirty.

If content producers are looking at this revenue stream as an answer, they’re going to be disappointed.

Jeff

My company, Advanced Telecom Services, operates in both North America and Europe. Interestingly, in Europe, it is very common for media to offer premium rate SMS services like the one on Big Brother. In the United States and Canada, however, media have been slow to use premium SMS and have instead opted for primarily standard rate SMS services (free to the consumer).

It would seem that with advertising in the USA down 15% since last year, that media would be looking for non-traditional revenue like premium SMS offers, but especially in the radio industry, American media are not willing to charge their listeners.

Bob Bentz

I’ve worked in the CSC space a few years ago and have a dummies guide located here – http://www.cognation.net/csc

The big issue with CSC in the USA are startup costs ($1000pm if you choose the 5 or 6 digit number OR $500pm if randomly assigned)

and secondly – with premium CSC’s the greedy carriers and aggregators in the USA take about 50% for themselves.

Yep you read that right 50%.

So basically that $1 text you spent, 50c of it went to AT&T and then after charges maybe Big Brother gets 30-50c of it.

In the UK they have much more business friendly CSC terms and easier to setup (and i dont mean shared keyword CSC’s like socialcord above) I mean 7 days for your own dedicated CSC.

As such you see a lot more standard and premium CSC campains in the UK compared to the USA (not sure if thats a good or bad thing).

Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Cognation.net