INDIANAPOLIS – December 10, 2008 – For the second consecutive quarter, ChaCha announced that among pure-play SMS search providers ChaCha, Google SMS and Yahoo! SMS, ChaCha is the fastest growing service, capturing more than 28 percent of standard rate SMS search transactions between these providers in the third quarter (according to the Q3 Mobile Messaging Report from The Nielsen Company).
According to Nielsen, ChaCha’s 28 percent share of transactions is up from just seven percent in Q2, marking a 300 percent quarter over quarter gain, driven by a 660 percent quarter over quarter growth in overall ChaChatransactions. ChaCha reports that they now deliver 30 million impressions per month and have had more than 2.5 million users since the SMS answers servicelaunched in January.
“ChaCha’s viral growth of a new user every seven seconds is proof that ChaCha’s mobile answers service is unmatched – we offer the easiest and most effective mobile search experience in the U.S.,” said ChaCha CEO, Scott A. Jones. “Our rapid growth, millions of searches and demographic clearly demonstrate to advertisers that we are a major influence on the mobile search market, and have the capability to impact users’ buying decisions – which is especially relevant given advertisers’ interest in getting as much as possible out of their advertising dollar during these tough economic conditions.”
In the same quarter that drew ChaCha’s largest market share gain, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, the Obama presidential campaign, Palm and several other leading brands and agencies selected ChaCha’s Rich SMS Advertising solution to get their message out. Through one-to-one “conversational” engagement with the hard to reach 16-34 year old demographic, brands achieved well above industry average response rates of more than five percent according to ChaCha, a dramatic improvement over other mobile advertising solutions like SMS alerts and WAP banners.
In January 2008, ChaCha launched its free mobile answers service that uses human guides to find answers to consumers’ questions 24/7 on virtually any mobile device. ChaCha customers can send any question via SMS (242242) or voice (1-800-224-2242) and receive an answer back via a simple text message in real-time with no additional effort or cost. Guides utilize powerful tools to quickly return a succinct, relevant and useful answer in a text message in real-time.
About ChaCha
ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows customers to call 1-800-2ChaChaTM or text questions to ChaCha (242242TM) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. ChaCha expert guides - trained and skilled individuals - use ChaCha’s powerful internal search tools to respond to any query. For more information about ChaCha’s newest features, go to www.chacha.com. For more information about how to maximize the power of mobile answers to take your advertising and marketing campaigns to a new level on the mobile frontier, visit ChaCha’s 1:1 Mobile Marketing Solutions partner site at: http://partners.chacha.com/. Created by well-known entrepreneur Scott A. Jones (www.scottajones.com) and Brad Bostic (http://blog.bradbostic.com), ChaCha is funded by Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos; Morton Meyerson, former President and Vice Chairman of EDS as well as Chairman and CEO of Perot Systems; Rod Canion, founding CEO of Compaq Computer; and Jack Gill, seasoned Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
