SMS Charging For Reception
by Ewan Spence
Having sat now through a few talks at Global Messaging 2007, it seems that the industry is feeling boxed into a corner. There’s a lovely solution that they could implement that would make all the effort of getting a variety of messages to their customers financially worthwhile… charge the receiver.
I think that a pay to receive per message is not the solution going forward, and if it is being considered then it would be a huge mis-step.
It’s a revenue concept that is already present in the US texting market, but one that Europe has traditionally shied away from. When the networks deliver a message, they are doing their best to find a way to derive an income stream. Or in their words, “we’re working to figure out how to solve the problem.†The problem of course is that once you’re using a service for a certain cost (in the case of UK based SMS roughly 10p to send and free to receive), it’s very hard to convince the customer that they should pay more for a similar service.
It’s one reason why the uptake of MMS was not as predicted. People were comfortable at the 10p per SMS message in the UK, and the idea of generally paying 25p per message was not something that appealed to them. Yes you can send a large chunk of text, pictures, sounds, or video clips via MMS (up to 100K of data), but in the cold light of day, the increased cost outweighed the perceived increase in capability.
It’s a lesson I hope the mobile industry takes on board as they attempt to move forward from solely SMS as messaging, to integrate a number of mobile messaging formats into the everyday handsets. The largest hurdle to overcome is how not only to make money, but to bring the customer along for the ride.
