Growth in Prepaid Wireless Service Continues

Mike Sachoff reports about prepaid wireless services;
Online visits and search referral activity to six leading prepaid wireless sites increased 37 percent over the previous year, according to a new report from comScore.
Growth in prepaid wireless was driven primarily by MyCricket (up 107%) and BoostMobile (up 105%), both of which more than doubled in visitation over the prior year. MetroPCS and Net10 also saw solid gains, growing 63 percent and 37 percent, respectively.
The marketing messages of most prepaid wireless providers are focused on the youth market, data indicates considerable interest in the plans among 35-64 year olds. The majority of visitors to Net10 (60.3 %) and TracFone (58.7%) were from this older age segment. Even for sites where the majority of visitors were under 35 years of age, 35-64 year olds made up at least 40 percent of visitors.
comScore also looked at search referral activity. The results showed that both paid and organic search are driving increased referral activity, but organic search is significantly outpacing paid search referrals overall.
A few of the sites performed well in receiving growth from organic search referrals compared to paid search referrals. Organic clicks to BoostMobile grew 310 percent, while paid clicks grew 199 percent. Organic clicks to MyCricket.com grew 123 percent compared to 63 percent growth in paid clicks; and organic clicks to MetroPCS.com grew 148 percent compared to 17 percent growth in paid clicks.