Problems With Shortcodes Could Harm SMS Revenues
Over in Europe where SMS shortcodes are popular ways of getting content, there’s a bit of a problem. It seems that many smaller operations “share” short codes, that need to be associated with a particular keyword to get the right info. However, if users mistype or ignore the keyword the system doesn’t work properly – and some are suggesting that nearly 50% of SMS revenue from such shortcodes may be lost this way. This reminds me of the early days of the internet when online stores would go with bigisp.com/~mylittlestore/ or something as their domain name, instead of spending the $35 to get their own. If 50% of potential revenue is being lost due to shared shortcodes, the shared shortcodes will go away quickly.
