Get Paid to Receive Advertising by AerialTextPhilly

Mobile Weblog talks about AerialTextPhilly

I used to join a lot of this free money making programs and most of them went bust. How is this company going to survive ?

The company recruits people to sign up to receive sms advertising by promising to pay them US 15 c for every advertisement they receive.

This would all be hunky dory, except the model NEVER works and frankly, I'd advise them to change their model or shut up shop. Sorry if this is blunt, but if they take my advice, they'll thank me for it in the end - or end up kicking themselves if they ignore it.

There have been loads of these kinds of propositions online and they never worked there either.

And it's been tried in the UK on mobile by, among others, The Mobile Channel, who morphed into something else, when they discovered the inevitable. We even tried it at ZagMe, against my better judgment, but when the CEO of your main backer insists, you don't have a lot of choice in the matter...

Let's look at why it doesn't work, for a moment.

If I sign up and they send me the maximum number of advertising messages of 2 per day (which will be unlikely in the beginning as they have to sell to advertisers), I can earn the princely sum of $10 a month (roughly). In return, I have to have my phone beep at me twice a day with ads where I have no control over content, if they're well targeted to me etc.

$10 to most US citizens is not a lot of money, quite frankly. So the sorts of people attracted to this deal will be....people with not much money. This, in turn, does not make them very attractive to advertisers.

The company promises advertisers:

And, because our audience is subscription based, your messages are seen by the consumers interested in buying your products and services.

No they're not. They're interested in earning $10 a month. That's all. So even response rates will be unimpressive.

That's not to say a subscription-based sms service can't work - I've written a whole free white paper on it, if you haven't read it. But the main learning is that people welcome sms advertising, if they buy into a promise that they'll like what they receive, it'll take into account their preferences and interests and they can stop both the service or a specific advertiser easily and at any time.