American Idol Ranks in 41.5 Million Text Messages

[Mike Temporale]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.mobiledia.com/news/32021.html' target='_blank'>http://www.mobiledia.com/news/32021.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Cingular Wireless announced today it has set a new record for wireless text messaging in the fourth season of "American Idol." The company recorded more than 41.5 million text messages throughout the show's 12-week voting period, which is believed to represent the largest volume of text messaging in a single campaign in the history of the U.S. wireless industry."</i><br /><br />At $0.10 a message, that's over $4 Million. Even if we say that half of the people who sent text messages have unlimited text messages on their plan, so it doesn't cost them anything to send a message, that still means fans of American Idol spent over $2 Million on voting, trivia, and other Idol features. 8O

[seaflipper]

It really would be interesting to know how much Cingular really did rake on that deal. I know I voted once. Well, that is, I voted 20 times for one person (don't even remeber who it was anymore, it was early in the show) and I have 300 SMS a month....

I have a feeling that that actual number of paying customers is much less than $2 million in revenue, but you can bet that the continual announcing Cingular as the SMS partner has a good impact on their branding.

And I think you can send a message from any carrier, not just Cingular, so all of those messages were probably not just from Cingular customers...