For those who haven’t heard yet, the volume of SMS messages sent in 2008 broke 20 billion. This is up from just north of 10 billion in 2007, which is up from about 4.3 billion in 2006 and about 2.1 billion in 2005.
We are already on pace in 2009 to again double volume to 40 billion SMS messages.
While the heavy users are messaging over 145 messages per month each, the number of uniques has grown to over 50% from 41% in 2008.
Uniques are growing at about 2% a month and recently 600,000 people sent their first text message!
For the first time ever, the number of messages sent through shortcode marketing programs is available. It looks like over 1 billion messages were sent to a shortcode in Canada in 2008. This is in addition to the 20 billion peer to peer messages sent.
Does anybody still think Mobile SMS is not a mass medium in Canada?
It certainly isn’t. I’m a heavy SMS user. In three years of having my smartphone, I have received a grand total of five — yup, 5 — messages that were from a marketing or sales promotion. And all of those messages were from my cell provider themselves. I asked several friends about this… all said they have received less than 5 messages in total in the entire time they’ve owned an SMS enabled phone/service.
But by your math, 1 in 20 messages is from a marketer? C’mon. In the remote chance this is true, how many of those are from the cell provider to their customer base (for setup, ongoing maintenance messages, data limit warnings) vs. how many are from external marketers?
I call bulls#it.