Premium SMS

Premium SMS has well and truly kicked off in Australia. TV shows, radio stations are getting into it it's everywhere! Seems the teens will SMS to cast their vote or make their opinion felt.

Hopefully this will have a spin off to make more young people vote in political elections.

Anyway...

Have you used it or do you see a way of profiting from premium SMS from the webmaster perspective.

So far, the opportunities seem to be only with ring-tone affiliate stuff.... is there anything else?

If I can find a cheap enough deal I may look at making it a method of payment for donations to our work with homeless people via premium SMS.

Any thoughts?

Who is cashing in on this new technology and how are they doing it?

 

Ringtones and logos are absolutely massive here in the UK, and the rest of Europe. Unfortunately this means all the search terms are very competitive..

Being an affiliate of a ringtone/logo seller would seem to be the way to go, unless you have the cash to start your own ringtone company of course

 

I do the ring tone thing and the phone backgrounds. I am about to affiliate for streaming porn video from a company called AEBN.com. (x-mobile) I put together a a private website that takes subscribers and delivers daily alerts for a monthly fee. That is working out VERY well. The start up was fairly easy for a programmer. If you have your own product and want to sell it via cell phone billing you need about a 10k startup. If your doing things on a smaller scale like billing online and delivering the product via cell phone it is actually cheap. I recomend a company called http://springlands.com/. I have seen the HUGE explosion of SMS around the world and predict the same to happen here in the USA shortly. If there is one thing to take advantage of that would be to gather mobile phone numbers. Use a poll on your website, give away free background images whatever. Remember the profit from e-mail lists. Get in now and gather OPT IN mobile phone number lists and you will find them in HIGH demand when the timing is right. If you would like to discuss this furthur please PM me or reply to this post.

BIGBOB

 

i cant understand that. the thing with sms has been really big here in greece for the past 2 years. when someone told me that sms where not of such use in the US and the countries around i wondered why.... now you say that.
as of now i there are a bunch of sites that use the sms premium for sending tones and bg like prizes etc.

 

What sort of prizes? How does that work?

 

I myself am looking for a service where people can send text messages to a site, it has to be as cheap as possible, does anyone know a service like this?

 

hmmm
there is a question on the site like "who is the president of the U.S"
ppl send the answer and if they are right they get send a tone

 

Do you mean i send you an sms from my mobile to your site? If so, do you want to offer your customers some type of added value service or do you just want to make money out of it?

 

you send a message from your cell to a data center which co-operates with the site

If you find a really good way and encourage ppl to send sms then i guess you will get a nice aggregate amount of money.

The key is to present it as a added value type of promotion whereas its a revenue generating event

 

I've been interested in doing this too.
Does anyone know any good UK SMS payment processors? To get started with?

The main thing that put me off was the large % of overheads (I think it was like 40 or 50 percent from the payment processors I saw) and the bad press that it's had.

 

The reason i asked is that if it was just to add value, then I would recommend a free-for-the-consumer option.

If the latter is your main concern, try www.clickatell.com (one of our competitors)! I remember reading that they take a fixed management fee and leave you to keep any profits that you make!