No. Charging a few thousand users $1 to receive a text message of content is probably not viable, unless the information is very niche market (financial).I'd have thought the day of big buck from premium text services is past.
But charging tens of thousands (hundred thousands) of end users perhaps $0.05 (5 cents) to receive some content that is useful to them (eg English words used in the financial sector, or words for the hospitality sector etc), is very viable.
If I make a couple of cents profit per daily message, then I should get $1 or $2 per month per user. 100,000 users = $100,000 USD per month.
This is not pie in the sky, but one has to offer the right content 'on a plate' to someone who is too lazy to search the web for that content.
I did my projections for this service for Myanmar, but there are some technical issues right now with sending premium SMS messages to the Myanmar mobile networks. But I can do it right now on the Cambodian and Vietnamese mobile networks, and those 2 countries have many citizens who have similar views about learning/improving their English ==> they want to do this, unlike the lazy, xenophobic Thais! (I can send premium SMS messages to the Thai mobile networks, but I haven't yet thought of a money-making idea for Thailand...)
BTW - if you want to know more about my SMS background, check out on Google: