Earn Cellphone Minutes by Watching Ads

NYT With the cost of mobile phone calls already dropping sharply, Virgin Mobile USA plans to announce a way that people can talk for no money at all. They will, however, have to pay with a chunk of their attention. The program, called SugarMama, lets people earn one minute of talking time by watching 30-second commercials on a computer or receiving text messages on their phones, then answering questions to prove they were, in fact, paying attention.

I have seen this done in other venues, and it did not last long there. It remains to see how it works here.

Virgin Mobile, a relatively small cellphone carrier with four million mostly young customers, is aiming the program at teenagers, who can earn up to 75 minutes of free talk time a month.

The problem there is that teenagers have recently been through our public school system, and they don't teach kids to understand what they read, and answer questions about it.