Comments on: “American Idol” — Cook-ed by TXT Messages

By: kimbo

kimbo — Sat, 24 May 2008 04:19:23 +0000

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.

By: Overheard: AT&T and American Idol - Overheard in the tech blogosphere

Overheard: AT&T and American Idol - Overheard in the tech blogosphere — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:58:48 +0000

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

By: Raymond Padilla

Raymond Padilla — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:32:48 +0000

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

By: Get Digital :: Get Noticed.

Get Digital :: Get Noticed. — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:48:16 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:45:27 +0000

.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:

http://textrapolate.com/2008/05/get-digital-get-noticed/

By: GET DIGITAL :: get noticed

GET DIGITAL :: get noticed — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:04:29 +0000

By: Richard H-S

Richard H-S — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:06:09 +0000

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.

By: pazarlama

pazarlama — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:36:10 +0000

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.

By: Juha Huttunen

Juha Huttunen — Fri, 23 May 2008 07:43:33 +0000

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…

By: ol' yeller

ol' yeller — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:39:31 +0000

.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.

By: Arjun

Arjun — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:43:16 +0000

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 http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Media__Entertainment_/Reality_TV_shows_text_SMS_revenue_earnings_for_telcos/articleshow/2363976.cms)

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:55:10 +0000

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.

By: ol yeller

ol yeller — Thu, 22 May 2008 23:05:56 +0000

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.

By: plin

plin — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:48:01 +0000

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.

By: Erik

Erik — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:36:32 +0000

“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.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:43:53 +0000

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….