The cell phone chain text.

I know we have all received those stupid chain text that claim if you don't or do something you will be punished or rewarded.

I received one today and thought about what the creator of one of these things really gets out of sending it in the first place. I mean, they send it to ten people and get some bites, it ends there for them. They are not able to tally up all of the messages "hits" after it leaves their phone.

So, it got me thinking. The one who would benefit from this is the individual cell phone companies. For instance, I do not have unlimited minutes, text or multimedia plan. Usually now a days when you receive these chain texts they include a little picture usually animated. For me, to just receive that cost me 50 cents to 75 cents. There is no way I can screen the incoming message and say no, so there is 50-75 cents. Then, if I were to send that message out to 10-15 people at $1.00 a pop, well it would certainly add up.

Just wanting to get some ideas and feedback. Searched the web trying to see if I could find anything and came up short.

I just feel like the stupid chain texts are more than juvenile entertainment to share with friends and get some giggles out of. There is big money being generated by those annoying messages.

There is a lot of money to be made off of people who still pay $.50, $.75, $1.00 rack rates for text messages when unlimited service for text and media is as little as $5.00 a month these days. I would suspect most chain texts are sent from annoying users with unlimited text plans.

yea and there are still people who pay for ringtones and who always enter the SMS lottery to "win pricez" but they never really win,the money goes to some rich #!^#$,while they hook you up on the next sms lottery and want you to send more and more money axaxaxax

reply to post by sniknej

there is a remedy for that which I have already implemented.

Get a Tracfone and use it.

Incoming texts do not count toward your costs
only outbound. And another great point is there
are no monthly fees. You buy mins on the card
pre-paid and no contracts. Use it once and throw
it in the trash if u wanted to. No $200.00 breech
of contract for giving up your phone early like with
other cell plans.

Sure, Tracfone may not be as nice quality as your
existing phone but you won't have a huge monthly
fee associated with it either. And NO CONTRACT.
You can walk away from ur Tracfone whenever
you want.

You can get Tracfones from ur local Wally-World
for around $20.00 plus tax and add $20.00 worth
of mins from a card and ur all set. It worked for me

With Tracfone, ur outgoing texts are counted as 1/3
of a min. If a min costs u 10 cents, then you can text
message for 3.3 cents per text. Sure beats the heck
outta 50-75 cents doesn't it ???


Outgoing text messages = 3.3 cents per text
Incoming text messages = FREE

Great deal !!!

Thank you guys for posting the alternatives, but i am more interested in the idea that the companies are making alot of money from this and wondering if maybe they are generating some of these messages.

Originally posted by sniknej
Thank you guys for posting the alternatives, but i am more interested in the idea that the companies are making alot of money from this and wondering if maybe they are generating some of these messages.

Something that interests me about these chain texts/letters is the growth rate.

If the message contains an instruction to pass it on to 10 people, and on average 2 of those forward it on again, it can grow to 300,000,000 (approx population of USA) copies within just 28 steps along the chain I believe.

I hope my math isn't too rusty, but I think it's calculated like this:

ln(300,000,000)/ln(2) = 28.1603873 steps

Or for 6 billion (approx population of world):

ln(6 000 000 000) / ln(2) = 32.4823154 steps

I think there are many factors to take into account, like whether or not people who receive it multiple times continue to pass it on, and other such oddness.

All this makes me wonder if it would actually be a little dangerous for the phone companies to start these themselves. With crazy growth like that, it seems feasible that a very popular chain text could cause huge problems on the network, so while they make some $$$ from the texts, the cost of unsatisfied customers from poor service like calls being unable to be made might be unacceptable.

I wonder how many times some of the most popular chain texts do get passed on?

reply to post by harpsounds


Wow, thanks for playing with the numbers like that.

That is a bunch of money we are talking about. If i had a cell phone company, I think that I would have a team that focused on sending out chain texts.

Would companies sending out chain text like that be considered illegal?