[...] your marketing muscles a lot of WOW factor.  Om Malik, a popular tech blogger I like to follow, wrote in a blog this morning about how text messaging was used with American Idol to generate a lot of cash.  “AT&T [...]

[...] your marketing muscles a lot of WOW factor. Om Malik, a popular tech blogger I like to follow, wrote in a blog this morning about how text messaging was used with American Idol to generate a lot of cash. “AT&T says [...]

[...] Om Malik, “American Idol” — Cook-ed by TXT Messages [...]

Om, operators sell SMS in packages and a la carte. I think it averages to about $0.05c per message. I think the bigger deal for AT&T and operators here is that people started to use text via. Idol.

Will be interesting if Apple and iPhone teach them to vote in some other way over WiFi….

“Will be interesting if Apple and iPhone teach them to vote in some other way over WiFi….”

Not soon.

There are about 3 million iPhones in the US. AI received 97 million votes yesterday.

The digerati is not the mainstream.

Erik,
Is the 97 million isn’t unique though. It probably contains a group of people that voted multiple times. Do they release a unique number regarding how many participants there are?
I agree with above that with the transformation of smart phone, the way voting will be done might be completely different in a couple years.

Probably AT&T made about $0.04 per vote, plus whatever additional traffic the show generated through banter among friends. Some people probably upgraded their text bundles too. Plus some free marketing.

I think .04 or .05/vote is pretty aggressive since the demographics most likely to vote are the same who are likely to be heavy text users to start with.

I’d love to know the stats, but it’s probably more about driving the text habit and therefore message bundles than per-message fees.

Good that these shows are raking in SMS revenue - its a very attractive model to rake in revenue by volumes. Compare this to India, where reality show based SMSses from watchers go upto 1.5billion messages _per_week (source (link) )

.04 per vote is a weighted average based on actual statistics - some users pay a la carte .20 per vote, some have plans and average .01 per message.

This kind of SMS to TV interaction is almost 10 years old in Europe and Asia. We’ve had SMS votings, chats, games and bunch of other stuff since 2000 and the SMS messages have mostly been premium messages priced at about 1.5 USD (about 1 EUR) per message providing quite significant revenues not just to operators but to the TV networks and production companies. I used to run such a business back in 2000. You guys should study a lot more what has happened in Europe since 2000 in this area…

I think .04 or .05/vote is pretty aggressive since the demographics most likely to vote are the same who are likely to be heavy text users to start with.

Juha is right. To reinforce ATT are not the real winners in this space. Its the TV companies. The next thing to watch for is willful abuse of this revenue stream. ITV in the UK are taking multi-million pound fines from the regulators. Reckon that they wish they had never heard of premium SMS.

.04 to .05 per vote is actually about right. Working for a marketing firm that manages SMS campaigns I have secret shopped a lot of other SMS marketing firms and this is somewhat the industry standard.

Here is an interesting blog I put together this morning that builds on Om’s blog and gives further insight into how SMS can be used for marketing:

(link)

I can’t believe you dissed Cook. The alternative — a 17-year old that appears to be the next Manilow — is far worse.

95% of people that vote are just chewing through the free text’s included in their bundle.

So in short, this doesn’t generate much money for anyone.

The powers that be are being stupid about this. They could charge people 25cents/vote and they’d still pay.