My lunch with Matt Mullenweg was awesome. More on that later tonight. He’s very smart, but more on him later — WordPress actually fits a bit into what I’m seeing right now. Right now I’m sitting with Ron Hirson, program management director, Ebbe Altberg, vice president of product development and operations, and Scott Faber, co-founder and creator of Ingenio.
They caught my eye when they told me they have a very nice business all based on charging people for phone calls.
Huh?
Well, remember when I got my divorce? I paid that lawyer $150 per hour. But my lawyer had a bunch of back end processing to do to get his $150. What if he could just automatically charge me everytime I called him based on the duration of the call?
But, it’s bigger than that. They built an advertising platform that is ahead of anyone else including the “G” or the “Y” or the “M.”
“What kind of dope you smoking in San Francisco, Scoble?”
Heheh, but here’s the deal. Let’s say you’re a pizza restaurant. How do you get most of your business? Cell phone, right? Is that going to change just because you buy some click-to-pay ads on some search engine? No. Most people will still find your phone number and call you.
So, why can’t an ad be served to you that has the phone number right in it? Problem is, how does a company like AOL collect its advertising fee? Well, they’ve built a system where you actually are calling an Ingenio phone, which then sends the caller to the pizza place.
And, guess what? They have an auction system to decide on advertising rates and Ingenio collects a piece of the dollar and sends the rest onto the Web site where they placed the ad.
Hey, Chris Pirillo, I can see that you’d be totally into this for your http://gada.be service.
They even have created their own search engine for cell phones that’ll bring you advertisers: http://local.ingenio.com/mobile, but don’t get confused by that (although if you look at that site on my cell phone you’ll see all the phone numbers are links that I can call instantly — making phone numbers far more useful than Web links on my cell phone).
They’ve created a few Internet Connected Components where they can throw advertisements into partner’s sites. They showed me how their ads are showing up on AOL’s search site, for instance. They showed me how a mortgage broker is paying $55 per call just to be listed on the various services that Ingenio distributes its ads to. $55 per freaking call!! So, if your mom goes to AOL search, searches on, say, Los Angeles Mortgage the Money Tree is paying Ingenio big bucks to be there (hundreds of mortgage companies are vying for that spot, by the way, highest bidder shows up first). See the phone number? That’s Ingenio.
Ca-ching! The cash register rings.
It’s ingenious. Oh, sorry. Ingenio. I wish I had a cut.
And you’re only seeing one quarter of what Ingenio is doing.
Scobleizer 
Not much talk of privacy concerns in all this technology.
The assumption that the market will balance the excesses of advertising is false, witness television.
There is lots more personal computing that can be done without everything being centerlized in google, AOL, or MSN. Gates/Ozzie are too quick to “me too” Google and are making the most spectacular mistake imaginable for MSFT.
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Not much talk of privacy concerns in all this technology.
The assumption that the market will balance the excesses of advertising is false, witness television.
There is lots more personal computing that can be done without everything being centerlized in google, AOL, or MSN. Gates/Ozzie are too quick to “me too” Google and are making the most spectacular mistake imaginable for MSFT.
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Well inGenio has a great potential of being integrated with local search and VoiP. Since the advertising rates are so high, GYM can actually through in free calls for end users via gtalk, messenger or msn. This is a very practical solution for hotels/travel etc that have international clientele. Yahoo is trying Ingenio and Om tells me Google is with VoiceStar.
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Well inGenio has a great potential of being integrated with local search and VoiP. Since the advertising rates are so high, GYM can actually through in free calls for end users via gtalk, messenger or msn. This is a very practical solution for hotels/travel etc that have international clientele. Yahoo is trying Ingenio and Om tells me Google is with VoiceStar.
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Scoble,
Did you talk to Matt about how he broke his word and STOLE the domain WordPress.Com from me? Or ask him if he cares that soon I will ask a Jadge to stop the hosting service on MY domain?
Soon all your readers will not be able to access http://scobleizer.wordpress.com because Matt is a jerk.
In fact, the whole WordPress community will suffer because Matt thinks he is too ‘smart’.
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Scoble,
Did you talk to Matt about how he broke his word and STOLE the domain WordPress.Com from me? Or ask him if he cares that soon I will ask a Jadge to stop the hosting service on MY domain?
Soon all your readers will not be able to access http://scobleizer.wordpress.com because Matt is a jerk.
In fact, the whole WordPress community will suffer because Matt thinks he is too ‘smart’.
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what about the calls to Ingenio clients that are from salespeople or boyfriends of teh receptionist, etc??? Do I (the Ingenio Client) have to pay $55 for some dumbass realtor that clicks on my SEM add then calls for leads from me the Mortgage Broker (Ingenio Client)? This is a BIG problem…The solution to this problem doesn’t scale that well, cuz it takes people.
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what about the calls to Ingenio clients that are from salespeople or boyfriends of teh receptionist, etc??? Do I (the Ingenio Client) have to pay $55 for some dumbass realtor that clicks on my SEM add then calls for leads from me the Mortgage Broker (Ingenio Client)? This is a BIG problem…The solution to this problem doesn’t scale that well, cuz it takes people.
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Yeah, these guys have been around for a while, and it’s a great idea. It’s all about the long tail, really. How many local businesses actually have a website? Probably less than 1%. Adwords can only cater to businesses that actually have a site, so they miss out on a massive market. But how many local businesses have a phone? All of them. So pay-per-call could potentially be very big indeed, putting online advertising within the reach of every business.
What next? Extreme localization. You shouldn’t need to put Los Angeles in the search – that should be assumed based on your location. And if you’re searching on a mobile phone, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Anyway, nice post!
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Yeah, these guys have been around for a while, and it’s a great idea. It’s all about the long tail, really. How many local businesses actually have a website? Probably less than 1%. Adwords can only cater to businesses that actually have a site, so they miss out on a massive market. But how many local businesses have a phone? All of them. So pay-per-call could potentially be very big indeed, putting online advertising within the reach of every business.
What next? Extreme localization. You shouldn’t need to put Los Angeles in the search – that should be assumed based on your location. And if you’re searching on a mobile phone, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Anyway, nice post!
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Hi Zach,
This is a great question and is similar to the issues facing PPClick in the click-fraud realm. To solve this problem we’ve added some smarts to the platform and also have some good luck in that a call in its nature is very different than a click. While nothing we build is going to solve for every case, here’s what we’ve done so far:
1. Call Details – Because a call is an interaction between two people (and sometimes voicemails machines) the people are able to discern whether a call is legitimate or not. To this end we capture the caller-ID (ANI) and report this to the advertisers. We also do not charge for short calls, so if you get a bogus call and either side hangs up — no charge. In the call details we provide, the time of the call, the caller-ID, what city the call came from, what number was called, the call result (pickup, hangup, # of rings) and whether you were charged. We go even further and don’t charge if we can’t read the caller-ID to protect against those who are somehow hiding their ANI.
2. Call Profiling – Part of the patented smarts we have is in call-profiling. For example, since we have all the information above, we can tell whether a call is a repeat call (and do not charge for the repeat calls) and like the click folks have some other not to be disclosed special sauce to protect our advertisers. (Purposefully vague here so that the copy-cats can’t catch up to us ).
3. Nature of call – An advertiser can instantly tell whether a call is bogus by the conversation. This isn’t possible in the click world where machines are talking to machines.
4. Existing Advertisers – Since we’ve been running on AOL and our other partners, we haven’t had complaints from our advertisers of this nature. I’m sure this will change, but so far so good
If you want to know more details, you can email me at ron@ingenio.com or call me at 415-248-4128.
All the best,
Ron
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Hi Zach,
This is a great question and is similar to the issues facing PPClick in the click-fraud realm. To solve this problem we’ve added some smarts to the platform and also have some good luck in that a call in its nature is very different than a click. While nothing we build is going to solve for every case, here’s what we’ve done so far:
1. Call Details – Because a call is an interaction between two people (and sometimes voicemails machines) the people are able to discern whether a call is legitimate or not. To this end we capture the caller-ID (ANI) and report this to the advertisers. We also do not charge for short calls, so if you get a bogus call and either side hangs up — no charge. In the call details we provide, the time of the call, the caller-ID, what city the call came from, what number was called, the call result (pickup, hangup, # of rings) and whether you were charged. We go even further and don’t charge if we can’t read the caller-ID to protect against those who are somehow hiding their ANI.
2. Call Profiling – Part of the patented smarts we have is in call-profiling. For example, since we have all the information above, we can tell whether a call is a repeat call (and do not charge for the repeat calls) and like the click folks have some other not to be disclosed special sauce to protect our advertisers. (Purposefully vague here so that the copy-cats can’t catch up to us ).
3. Nature of call – An advertiser can instantly tell whether a call is bogus by the conversation. This isn’t possible in the click world where machines are talking to machines.
4. Existing Advertisers – Since we’ve been running on AOL and our other partners, we haven’t had complaints from our advertisers of this nature. I’m sure this will change, but so far so good
If you want to know more details, you can email me at ron@ingenio.com or call me at 415-248-4128.
All the best,
Ron
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