SMSGupShup (India’s “Twitter”) Grows To 20 million Users, $150,000/month Revenue

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/04/smsgupshup-indias-twitter-grows-to-20-million-users-150000month-revenue/

by jasonlbaptiste • 17 years ago

10 11 17 years ago

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Well that kind of proves once again that there's not money in this thing. $2m a year in revenue off 20m users. Not to mention the SMS fees which likely mean they are losing cash hand over fist.

inerte• 17 years ago

The article doesn't mention the costs (at least I didn't see). They could be paying the bills.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Hence my use of "likely". It's entirely SMS based, so the SMS use must be massive... 100s of millions. Multiply that even by a good bulk discount and the total is significantly more than $150k.

But even if they are making 100% profit--an impossible amount--they are only making $2m a year. They'd be better off selling sandwiches.

foppr2• 17 years ago

No, it just proves that indeed this thing has legs. Once that's possible so is monetization.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Because something is popular doesn't mean it can be monetized. If you give me a tasty free lunch every day I'll keep coming back. I might even bring friends. When it gets to 20m free lunches every day that just means free shit's popular, not that it's a good business.

ryanwaggoner• 17 years ago

I could be way off here, but I thought that once you get above a certain level of SMS traffic, you can actually negotiate a rev-share deal with the networks. After all, they're making a LOT of money from their subscribers off all that SMS traffic.

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Incoming messages in India does not cost anything to the recipient, and smsgupshup is mainly a one to many broadcast system.

lut4rp• 17 years ago

This is totally weird... Being an Indian myself, I agree SMS is a very common communication system here, but I've never heard of this website. AND, I'm not 40+, I'm still in college :-)

SingAlong• 17 years ago

haha...

me too. I'm still in colg and also working on an sms app. I've done my research and atleast among people I've met... Hackers, college crowd, oldies, etc I haven't seen this get popular.

And as @aak said, this isn't a Twitter competitor at all. It's a Group SMS service (ya the one to which we like to send "good morning" every evening).

aak• 17 years ago

This isn't equivalent to Twitter at all. SMSGupShup is a groups platform built on SMS.

SMSGupShup (India’s “Twitter”) Grows To 20 million Users, $150,000/month Revenue

Related Stories