Watch an ad and earn free cell phone minutes.That's a model I've advocated before - providing free services in exchange for accepting ads - and it's the model now being adopted by Virgin Mobile. Subscribers can earn one free minute for every 30 second ad they watch, up to 75 free minutes in a month. To make sure people are truly paying attention to the ads there is a quiz about the content that must be answered before the free minute is actually earned. Customers can go online to sign up for the program and some big time advertisers have signed on to have their ads delivered.
OK, that's the serious side of this. Here's where I'm giving in to my inner wiseass, and no, I'm not making any of this up. The program is called "SugarMama." Yes, SugarMama. That gets even better when you take into account this quote from Virgin exec Howard Handler, who describes SugarMama as "someone who shows up and gives you some extra gratification and gets you over the hump."
There are some days I really love this job.
1. Hi Chris, really terrific to hear you are an advocate. Thank you. This is our patents-pending business model that gives complete control of advertising to the viewer. Ultramercial ads never play automatically. They are started and completed by the viewer at their request to "earn" free access to content they'd normally have to pay for such as airtime... or games, music or financial information. The advertiser in return knows once-and-for-all someone is watching their ad plus gets a good will spin by sponsoring content.
Paul Grusche
http://www.ultramercial.com
Posted at 7:04PM on May 30th 2006 by Paul Grusche