VIRGIN MOBILE'S NOT SO SWEET SUGARMAMA DEAL!

VIRGIN MOBILE'S NOT SO SWEET DEAL! 

Watch ads and get free mobile minutes ...if you've been reading my blog or my articles in trade pubs or consumer magazines online and off you know that I love FREE! BUT in this case it may not be such a sweet deal that Virgin is offering with a new program they are calling SugarMama. Here's a link to what BUSINESS WEEK had to say about the plan: A Sweet Deal for Virgin Mobile?

BUT it's not so simple, here are the hurdles I see from this project gaining users and speeding up adoption of video on mobile for Virgin (a pre-paid MVNO).

1) You have to watch the commercials on your PC (what percentage of pre-paid customers are going to run off to their PC to watch commercials is a big questions)...some of these folks may not even own PCs and may use their pals or the local library -- remember Prepaid users tend to be either cheap or broke according to my personal experience with folks who use pre-paid.

2) You don't just watch the commercials and then get freebie minutes -- you have to answer a quiz after the commerial? Lots of work for only 75 minutes (max) of free airtime.

3) Or you have to text message answers to the quiz. As my bro would say -- who's paying for the text messaging on this gig -- in otherwords, prepaid users like my brother who are on a budget hesitate to even start text messaging because it is an expensive addiction.

HERE's what I had to say when imediaconnection asked me for a comment on this new service: Check out their story at: Virgin Mobile: Watch Ads, Earn Minutes imediaconnection.com:

PARTIAL QUOTE FROM JOYCE SCHWARZ, JCOM about :Sugar Mama's deal for free airtime in return for watching ads looks sweet at first. but my concern is that when users realize they can only earn a max of 75 minutes per month, it may turn sour. Average use on cell phones is about 700 minutes per month -- 'working' to get 75 minutes of that free may just not be sweet enough," says Joyce Schwarz, iMedia contributor. "This is a case where a little bit of marketing may not go a long way. Recently announced competitor Xero is promising to go whole hog in the fall giving away phones for free and dangling the carrot of free service for watching TV-type ads. There's no doubt that advertising offers great revenue opportunity for mobile carriers, but my call is that it's much more valuable when it fully subsidizes services such as watch ads and you get free games or free texting. Even free cartons of Pepsi might be a better incentive."

Adjab.com -- always ROFL: .....Over at Adjab.com they have this great 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."

Comments

[blackpressradio]

I love the VirginMobile Sugar Mama promotion. I watch the commercials while I'm doing other stuff. It's the easiest five minutes of my day since I'm bombarded with ads all day with the Internet. Why not get free airtime in the promos!

Virgin Mobile customers......WE RULE!

[Sandy Sue]

700 minutes a month may be the norm for a teenager, but for a woman in her mid 50's who is usually near a landline, 75 minutes is usually more than I use in an entire month on my cell phone. Sugar Mama has enabled me to accumulate a huge balance on my phone and to only have to top up every 90 days. Sweet! Also, if you don't want to watch the ad, you can go to the bottom and click where it says something like,"having trouble viewing" and you can skip through it.

[Peter Piper]

I switched to Virgin Mobile because I was spending about $60/month on my Tmobile service. I realized that if I make most of my calls from home using an unlimited VOIP service I may be able to drastically cut back on my cell phone usage and save money. (As an extra bonus I can also cut down on the amount of time I'm bombarding my head with microwaves.) When Virgin Mobile came out with the flexible minute plans recently I decided to give that a try: $50 gets you 1000 minutes, $30 gets you 400 minutes, $200 gets you 200. Minutes roll over as long as you buy more before 30 days is up.

SugarMama helps sweeten the deal. I can watch the SugarMama ads while I'm emailing or doing something else on the computer so it doesn't take up much time. You can get five minutes per day, up to 75. It's not a lot but who can complain about free minutes?