• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 20, 2006

Savvy consumers already know their attention span is worth something. After all, advertisers pay publishers and broadcasters millions a year for a few minutes of their time. Virgin Mobile’s new Sugar Mama service eliminates the middleman (media) and goes direct to consumers with a simple bargain: Watch an ad and get remunerated.

In this case, viewers who sit through rich-media spots at the Virgin site and agree to interact with advertisers receive free airtime — up to 75 minutes additional monthly minutes on a customer’s pay-as-you-go wireless account.

Ultramercial LLC, the company that powers the sponsored day passes at Salon with a similar “attention-for-content” model, is also behind the Virgin plan. In Q1 2006, Ultramercial claimed a 6.85 percent click-through rate on its programs and a 43.2-second average viewing time with each ad.

Virgin customers opt-in to Sugar Mama by filling out a profile and agreeing to interact with the partner marketers after seeing the ad. Yes, kids, there will be a test on this material: To get an airtime credit, you must sit through a streaming media spot and then answer questions to prove you absorbed the key takeaways.

Launch sponsors Xbox, Pepsi, and the American Legacy Foundation’s anti-smoking “truth” campaign will get a two-way dialogue with a youth market that is hard to reach, let alone talk with.