NBC cashing in on ‘Deal’ texting

Cory Bergman February 11th, 2007

An interesting nugget in a speech by George Kliavkoff, NBCU’s chief digital officer, about Deal or No Deal. As you may know, viewers can play along while watching by sending in a text message, which enters them in a contest. A winner is revealed at the end of the show. “Everyone who text-messages in the first 10 minutes of the show stays to the end of the show,” Kliavkoff says. But here’s the nugget: as many as 1.5 million text messages have been sent during a single episode. NBC gets a cut of the .99 cents per message charge, so that’s no small change.