A paid for twist on Twitter. The UK’s SMS-based search service AQA 63336 (similar to the US’s ChaCha and 4Info), founded by ex-Symbian CEO and former Psion MD Colly Myers, has launched a commercial microblogging service that allows users to make money off of the texts that are received by their followers, that is, if your followers are willing to pay for the messages that they receive from you.

According to the announcement from the company today, publishers can create topics for people to subscribe to, market their topics to their followers, and fire away at them with texts to earn money. The memorably named AQA2U will then send the texts out to followers using premium text, with publishers getting a “majority share” of the net revenue received. Of the 12 pence ($0.17) that AQA2U gets for each premium text delivered, it will give 7-9 pence ($0.10-$0.13) back to the publisher, depending on volume. The company estimates that with 25 subscribers, a publisher can make 275 pounds ($400)  a year, or if the publisher manages to round up 250 followers, they can make 3000 pounds ($4367) a year. Subscribers pay 98 pence ($1.43) to subscribe to a topic, and then 25 pence ($0.36) per text, but no more than more than £3.50 ($5.10) per month for the texts.

Interestingly, to avoid consumers being bombarded with texts, AQA2U limits messages received to 14 a month, per topic. AQA2U will also be monitoring texts for offensive and “inappropriate” content. The company says it already has 200 publishers on board, and has also created some topics that people can subscribe to based on the most popular questions that gets texted in to their SMS-based search service, including lottery results and soccer scores. It’s hard to see followers paying for texts, unless perhaps you’re Ashton Kutcher. As for lottery results and soccer scores, don’t these text alerts already exist?

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