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Does Big Brother’s Paid Text Messaging Offer Hope for Content Producers?
Many of today’s reality shows use SMS/text messaging to get viewers involved with the show. American Idol uses text messaging to decide which contestant goes home. The CBS reality shows use text messaging for activities throughout each season. Most of the shows also offer the ability to vote online. American Idol doesn’t charge a fee for their text message; the only cost for the message comes from any carrier-based charges.
Last night on Big Brother, host Julie Chen announced that “America” would be the seventh juror in the jury that decides who wins the reality show. To participate in the voting, Julie noted that you could text message a code based on the selected choice (Jordan, Natalie or Kevin). After the voting instructions, a faster-speed terms statement was read that included a note that each text message is considered a premium message and will cost $1 on top of any carrier charges. CBS notes, “…and a premium text messaging charge of One Dollar ($1.00) for each successful vote.” They also state that a maximum of 10 text message votes per number are allowed for a potential total of $10.
While you can vote online for the winner, it sure seems like CBS pushes the paid text message option. Throughout the Big Brother season, there have been several contests which also allowed for premium $1/text message voting. With CBS claiming the Big Brother series continues to grow in viewership, is this a strong money train for the network?
More importantly, could this type of quick, impulsive text message option work for bloggers and other content producers? I’ve looked at a few systems over the past year that allow content producers to charge users based on SMS but I haven’t seen any of them in a production environment.
I’ve always thought that Paypal was the closest to an impulse purchase. Premium text messaging actually might be quicker and more impulsive as it doesn’t require an account to be funded, instead your mobile phone account is charged. I’d love some feedback about companies that offer this type of service for micropayments so leave them in the comments.
We’ve seen a variety of blogs attempting to charge for content and I’d like to see full RSS feeds available for a fee as well. Rather than signing up for a long subscription, you could view a short snippet of an article and then enter a confirmation code from your sms to view the full article.
Not true Allen! Social Cord allows you to create premium SMS subscriptions in 5 minutes. Check out http://socialcord.com!
Hi Allen,
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
Thanks for the coverage of the Big Brother use of premium SMS solutions.
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
In india it is charged double then the actual, to the sender.
Hi Allen,
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