Over the last month, the folks down at SMSCountry have been making some additions to their 160by2.com project.
Around three weeks ago they came up with MyAds, which allows users to post their ads (under 65 characters) that will appear after the SMS of people.
Anand, the chief blogger for 160by2.com said on the company’s blog:
That is what our new launch is all about. ‘My Ads’ as we call it is an interface that you can use to post your job, gadget or real estate requirements to the recipients of 160by2 msgs who may contact you if they could provide you with what you want.
Each user gets 5000 rupees worth of virtual cash that he can use to create ads (each SMS costs 1 rupee). These ads can turn out to be really helpful. One could use this as a classified or even to publicize his/her blog. They were also clever enough to give options to people to select the cities so that only users from that city would receive the SMS and hence make the ads more relevant to the users and advertisers alike. However, as of now it only includes four metros and AP (You can obviously opt for Pan India otherwise). You are supposed to mention your contact information (mobile number, email address, website) in your ad itself. Once you have exhausted your allocated amount, you will be given additional virtual money depending upon the quality(apart from some other factors) of your ad.
An interesting question now arises. How do they plan to execute such a quality check? Especially when the number of users on their site is increasing at a rapid pace.
The reason 160by2.com decided to have this feature is probably because they have been having good success through their advertisers and hence decided to open up their advertising service to people for free as well. The paid advertising service requires a minimum of 5000 SMS to be sent, this way they
Quite recently, they expanded MyAds and made those ads available on their online platform as well Anand explains the move by saying that it was the logical thing to do. With this new feature, the ads will be included in search results and also be made available to all the 160by2.com users apart from obviously going out to the recipients of the free SMS.
The 160by2.com team is overwhelmed by the response. They are currently sending out 2 lakh SMS daily tagged with a MyAd.
One of the points which remain unclear to me is: Could events be promoted using such a service? This could be effectively used to publicize a garage sale or an unconference and could reach out to a lot of people. However ofcourse, the issue of filtering would come up again and the authorities might call the ads irrelevant.
Rajiv Adds: There are other services like 160by2 like mGinger which has the backing of DFJ and 2 Million Dollars. There is also Way2Sms which according to alexa rankings is one of the most popular sms services in India. We had done a complete round up of such sms advertising services last year. Have a look here.
it is Very good for all and help full