How much money is Econet making from its SMS AND WIN promotion?

Econet is running a promotion where you answer up to 7 (or more) general knowledge questions for 30c per day for the chance to win various prizes. The promotion has been running since July and will end on the 2nd of October if it is not extended.

The grand prize is $20000 but there are also daily, weekly and monthly prizes to be won. 15 people get to win $2 worth of airtime every day and 5 people win phones every month for example.

As stated above, to subscribe to play it will cost you 30c per day to get a maximum of 7 questions. You can pay 5c per question if you want to answer more questions. If you play for the 90 days and not pay for extra questions you will enrich Strive to the tune of $27. A leaderboard is kept and the leader will win the $20000 at the conclusion of the promotion in October.

This is not the first time that Econet has run the SMS AND WIN promotion and so we can assume the first time around it was a financial success otherwise they would not have brought it back.

Econet has over 6 million active subscribers and if just 1% of those subscribers play the game that is over $18000 per day going into Econet’s coffers. Over the 90 days that the promotion runs that is over $1.6m. The 1% may be too low, or too high, but speculation will have to do as one would not expect Econet to share those figures.

That $1.6m is conservative in my opinion but it is enough to cover the cost of the prizes, which from my calculations should not exceed $100000, leaving a healthy profit. If the percentage of Econet subscribers playing the game is 5% we are looking at $90000 per day or $8.1m over 90 days. Of course we wouldn’t expect all of that 5% to play every day for 90 days.

That may be but the fact that Econet will deduct 30c from your account until you deactivate means a good number will get 30c deducted from their accounts for the duration of the promotion.

So do you play the game? If you do, have you ever won anything? If you do not play, what do you think about such kind of promotions? All the while remembering that it is not a crime for companies to seek out different revenue streams and that the winner of the $20000 will not care what we have to say about these kinds of promotions. In fact they are counting on us not to play, to increase their chances of winning.