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Jun. 18, 2007

Overall, premium SMS revenues totaled over $273 million, making up about 32 percent of mobile content revenue in Q1 2007, according to the new Telephia Premium SMS Report.

Telephia's new report includes content purchased via premium SMS from off-portal storefronts, as well as premium text messaging services, like voting/sweepstakes and chat.

Originally, SMS was defined as part of the GSM series of standards more than 21 years ago, as a means of sending messages of up to 160 characters, to and from GSM mobile handsets.

The term SMS is frequently used in a non-technical sense to refer to text messages themselves, particularly in non-English-speaking European countries where the GSM system is still very well-established.

Download purchases paid for via premium SMS at off-portal storefronts totaled nearly $215 million, accounting for 79 percent of premium SMS revenue.

These off-portal storefront purchases include content such as ringtones and horoscopes. Voting/sweepstakes entries generated more than $35 million.

While voting/sweepstakes entries generated only 13 percent of total revenues for premium SMS transactions, they represented 47 percent of premium SMS volume, equaling more than 34 million transactions.

Kanishka Agarwal, v.p. of mobile media, Telephia, said "Premium text messaging continues to be an additional way to reach consumers directly a healthy slice of the mobile content market.

Overall, this accounts for an off-portal share of 32 percent. Marketers are experimenting beyond the standard rate SMS voting pioneered by American Idol and tapping into premium SMS with voting/sweepstakes campaigns.

NBC's Deal or No Deal has translated into a premium SMS hit, generating nearly half of the volume and revenue of voting/sweepstakes entries in the first quarter of 2007."

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Source: Mediapost