

Ask HN: How to monetize free SMS notification service in India? - swapsmagic

We have a service through which we send out our users their indian railway ticket status updates. The updates goes through SMS/Email. 90% of our users provide us their mobile number to get the status update via SMS. But we haven't figured out yet how we can monetize those SMSes. Any idea/suggestion?
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bharathwaaj
You can slowly move from this to cloud telephony sector offering SMBs sms
feature. Competitive price and easy user interface along with analytics on ROI
should provide an edge.

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swapsmagic
I think, i didn't provide much information in the question. We have a website
where user subscribe with their Mobile No. and Indian Railway PNR. We send
them their PNR status updates via bulk SMS package which we have bought from
some third party service. Now each SMS cost us money, but we didn't figure out
how we can make money by sending SMS to thouse users. (i.e. putting
advertisement in SMS, but didn't find any Ad network provide such feature for
SMS).

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Sven7
Talk to advertisers - groupm, jivox, timesgroup etc

Tell them you can provide ad targeting based on age/location/sex/income(based
on age+compartment type)

Doors will open

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swapsmagic
One question: How can we get age from the railway ticket number? I don't think
indian railway discloses passenger age on their website.

