The Razor

Textmarks Launches Awesome Self Publishing Premium SMS Alerts For Bloggers February 19, 2007

Posted by David Kaye in : Mobile, User Generated Content , trackback

After 8 years in the mobile industry, it takes a lot to get me excited about a new service. This new SMS application from Textmarks, however, is very cool indeed.

In a nutshell, TextMarks allows anyone to set up and run an SMS alerts service. Here’s how it works: You sign up with them, reserve your keyword (e.g. RAZOR), and then anyone who messages the Textmarks shortcode (41411) can subscribe for $4.99/month or $9.99/month. The owner of the keyword can then send SMS messages to subscribers from a simple web-based interface.

This new tweak is clearly aimed at bloggers: Textmarks now offers a widget you can embed on your site that allows users to simply type in their phone number to sign up (subject to opt-in confirmation via a text sent to your handset).

I can see this working particularly well for entertainment-oriented sites with a fanatical following - TMZ and PerezHilton would be ideal candidates. Most premium SMS alert content is such garbage that something like this has real potential to succeed. Their biggest challenge is that the average blog reader probably skews tech savvier than the average Web user, and tech savvy users are going to be less likely to pay for something like this. For this reason, I would not be surprised to see these widgets start popping up on high traffic MySpace pages. Tila Tequila’s Message of the Day, anyone?

The major drawback is that the margins are horrible: after carrier fees and Textmarks’ 15% cut, the publisher is only left with 30% of the user’s subscription fee. Still, I like this a lot. If they can get away with it, I’d love to see them add support for binary content such as wallpapers and ringtones.

[via Techcrunch]

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1. The Razor » Interview with Ariel Poler, CEO Textmarks - February 24, 2007

[…] Earlier in the week I profiled Textmarks, a user-generated SMS content startup who just launched a premium SMS version of their service targeted at bloggers and other small content providers. The TechCrunch crowd gave the product a bit of a kicking, so I had a chat with the company’s CEO Ariel Poler to ask some questions about the product and find out why he thinks there’s a market for it. […]

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