Om suggests in his recent entry that “pay-per-call model … could be the “VoIP” play for Google.” A week back, I had suggested the same thing when I said, “Let me also speculate the real business plan behind GT. Once users become comfortable wearing a headset and talking over them, the ads can not only be linked to web pages but also to GT, thereby more effectively realize the objectives of thinkingVoice.”
The links in his post talk about Ingenio. Interestingly, the two business models are different. In the Ingenio model, the advertiser bids the price for a call against other competitor. In contrast, thinkingVoice charges are based on the length of the call. But both suffer from a basic drawback: the reader has to take some specific steps to initiate the call. In the case of thinkingVoice, the reader has to fill out a form; in the case of Ingenio, the reader has to dial out the number. Another link suggests that the reason Microsoft acquired Teleo for this same reason. You see, Teleo has the capability to convert any phone number on a web page or Outlook into a clickable string and when a user clicks on the phone number, the local Teleo client initiates a call to that number. So in a way, Teleo avoids the drawback I identified for the other two schemes.
But alas, there are no revenue opportunities in PPC. I want to bring to your attention that Skype already offers Teleo like capability. If an advertiser includes a phone number in an AdSense, a reader who has installed Skype can click on that number and initiate a Skype session. So the best Google Talk, MSN IM et al. can do is to join this by enabling the “callto” method just as Skype has done it. By the way, Microsoft’s NetMeeting had this capability for ever. So I am not sure that they have to acquire Teleo for this.
This method is not restricted only to soft clients running on the same machine as the browser. I have a patent pending scheme whereby a click on a browser will tickle an external VoIP client to initiate a call to the appropriate destination.
Posted by aswath at September 2, 2005 01:28 AM
Why should an advertiser pay for a Gtalk phone call from a consumer who basically knows no more about the product than what he sees in a banner ad? On the other hand, if he goes to the webpage and is interested enough that he wants more info then the PFC option makes sense. We're doing that now at PhoneRanger viz. encouraging visitors to call us by offering them a discount. But because they're already on the page, we don't pay GOOG or Wavigo anything.
Posted by: Phoneranger at September 2, 2005 03:46 PM