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Moolah Mobile teams up with SurgePhone Wireless to offer people a new way to pay their cell phone bills – by placing advertisements on their home screen.
Moolah CEO Vernell Woods (pictured above) said the start-up already offered gift cards and other rewards to users who viewed its ads on its home screen. So this is a similar model, with the difference that the ads subsidize Surge's cell phone service instead of ending up with gift cards.
Ads appear on the home screen of users during all these interstitial moments between two uses of the apps. The goal is therefore to offer a free service without the consumers having to change their behavior. Woods said that all the time spent in advertising was accumulating, with "the average person using their phone consistently" viewing "easily between two to three hours" of home screen ads each day. And that's enough to pay the "equivalent" of Surge's $ 10 monthly plan.
On the other hand, if for any reason a subscriber does not reach the total needed, Woods said that he could also earn more points by accepting bids or responding to surveys.
Moolah is not the only company to use advertising to make free previously paid products. Just last week, I wrote about PreShow, a start-up promising a free movie ticket to watch 15 to 20 minutes of commercials. (Not everyone was crazy about the idea.)
Moolah Mobile screen capture
But Woods said he did because he wanted to make wireless service more affordable for people in low-income communities. In this announcement, the board of investor Moolah "TI" said that it was "one of the few technology companies I've ever seen to really want to help citizens to access technology ".
But could this also be considered as a way to collect personal data from a vulnerable population? Woods said he wanted to protect himself from this with a blockchain initiative that should be launched this fall, allowing users to see exactly what data is shared with advertisers.
"No personal information should be communicated to advertisers without users knowing," he said, adding that companies "should in no case earn money" without giving users a reduction of their profits.
Subsidized wireless service should be available on Android Surge Volt devices equipped with Moolah installation kits, as well as on SIM start kits distributed by Surge. Moolah and Surge announced that they would initially begin with Florida, Virginia, Georgia and Texas, with the goal of reaching 40,000 sites by the end of the year. ;year.
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