As I spend endless hours everyweek sitting in traffic, trying not to lose my mind, whilst making my way to and from work, I channel surf through the maze of radio channel's that are available in the "Greater Dublin Area". Almost all of these radio channels have a texting facility, where you the punter can add comments or impart information to your fellow listeners, this appears to be particularily busy during the "rush hours", when pissed off travellers text in information on the state of traffic on their particular route.The radio station, DCAL in this case, then  they relay this information to others, great idea!

Now for the really annoying s##t, by sending them the information which essentially forms the backbone of the content they broadcast, THEY CHARGE YOU 20c,  thats right you pay them for their content, and its not just DCAL that does it, they all do it. So should 100,000 people a day contact radio stations via text they will generate €20,000 per day or €100,000 per working week or €5,200,000 per annum, couple this with advertising revenue which should increase due to increase in listeners they are quids in,and they d'ont even change the content.

I just find this incredible, I have never had the pleasure of  working/consulting for a company where the people who get nothing from the company actually pay, if you were to extend this practise to Tesco/Dunnes or any other big retailer you would have to pay say €1 just for a browse, feck, somehow I would thing that Sales would begin to fall off pretty quickly.

Having said all that though I wish I had thought of it.

PS, Mark, d'ont be getting any ideas about charging per word now..................