Fool.com: AOL Adds Pay-Per-Call [Motley Fool Take] January 25, 2005
AOL adding Pay-Per-Call is a smart move, but who's going to be selling it?
Mark Canon, one of the founders of Switchboard recently jumped ship from InfoSpace (which acquired Switchboard last year) to AOL. Mark has long been a proponent of PPCall and integrating it into Internet Yellow Pages as a way to add value and boost profits.
My only question is how AOL plans on selling the new service. They have had spotty success selling space in their own IYP, and this is pretty much the same thing.
AOL has the traffic, they have the technology and ad products, and now the only thing missing is the sales team.
Fool.com: AOL Adds Pay-Per-Call [Motley Fool Take] January 25, 2005: AOL Adds Pay-Per-Call
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* The Motley Fool Take
By Rich Duprey
January 25, 2005
For the small business without the time or expertise to set up a website, Internet advertising is pretty much a meaningless endeavor. The battles raging between Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), AskJeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ), and other search engines that offer advertiser-sponsored search results are an abstraction. The small business without a Web presence -- some 70% of all small businesses -- is more interested in getting a customer to call.
That's why pay-per-call is revolutionizing the search industry. It gives marketers a chance to reach out to that largely untapped demographic, providing a way for small businesses to reach the tens of millions of people who are online and in need of their products and services.
Rather than pay-per-click, where advertisers pay every time a customer clicks on an ad as it pops up in a search result, pay-per-call has the advertiser pay only when a customer calls a special telephone number. This provides advertisers a much more valuable service, since a customer who calls is much closer to being a customer who buys. It also helps paid search companies: They can charge a lot more for bringing that customer to the advertiser. Rather than pennies-per-click, they can charge dollars-per-call.
The latest marquee entrant into pay-per-call is Time Warner's America Online (NYSE: TWX), which partnered with privately held Ingenio to power sponsored search results. Ingenio owns the technology for pay-per-call. Last year, the small San Francisco-based company began distributing pay-per-call ads through FindWhat.com (Nasdaq: FWHT), which supplies paid search results though a network of websites.
The AOL deal is a boost to the model and to Ingenio simply because of the online giant's reach: 22 million subscribers. It already processes more than 700 unique searches a month from more than 35 million unique users. While most originate from within AOL itself, the new partnership is intended to enhance the relevance of AOL Search to all Web users. Although no date has been announced to indicate when the ads will start appearing in searches, the results returned will actually be a mix of paid listings from both Ingenio and Google. The AOL portal has featured Google-powered search results -- both paid ads and relevance-based ones -- since 2002, and in 2003 they inked a multi-year deal.
America Online has refined other aspects of its search tools as well. Users can more easily sort results into different categories using technology AOL originally launched with its Pinpoint Shopping site. It will offer its own "snapshots" of Google's results that link to relevant editorial content or information from other websites, similar to the AskJeeves "smart search" feature.
With small businesses finding pay-per-call an attractive option, that makes the model the next big thing in local search.
Mark Canon, one of the founders of Switchboard recently jumped ship from InfoSpace (which acquired Switchboard last year) to AOL. Mark has long been a proponent of PPCall and integrating it into Internet Yellow Pages as a way to add value and boost profits.
My only question is how AOL plans on selling the new service. They have had spotty success selling space in their own IYP, and this is pretty much the same thing.
AOL has the traffic, they have the technology and ad products, and now the only thing missing is the sales team.
Fool.com: AOL Adds Pay-Per-Call [Motley Fool Take] January 25, 2005: AOL Adds Pay-Per-Call
Email this article Email this page
Format for Printing Format for printing
Become a Fool! Become a Fool!
Request Reprints Reuse/Reprint
Discussion Boards
* The Motley Fool Take
By Rich Duprey
January 25, 2005
For the small business without the time or expertise to set up a website, Internet advertising is pretty much a meaningless endeavor. The battles raging between Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO), AskJeeves (Nasdaq: ASKJ), and other search engines that offer advertiser-sponsored search results are an abstraction. The small business without a Web presence -- some 70% of all small businesses -- is more interested in getting a customer to call.
That's why pay-per-call is revolutionizing the search industry. It gives marketers a chance to reach out to that largely untapped demographic, providing a way for small businesses to reach the tens of millions of people who are online and in need of their products and services.
Rather than pay-per-click, where advertisers pay every time a customer clicks on an ad as it pops up in a search result, pay-per-call has the advertiser pay only when a customer calls a special telephone number. This provides advertisers a much more valuable service, since a customer who calls is much closer to being a customer who buys. It also helps paid search companies: They can charge a lot more for bringing that customer to the advertiser. Rather than pennies-per-click, they can charge dollars-per-call.
The latest marquee entrant into pay-per-call is Time Warner's America Online (NYSE: TWX), which partnered with privately held Ingenio to power sponsored search results. Ingenio owns the technology for pay-per-call. Last year, the small San Francisco-based company began distributing pay-per-call ads through FindWhat.com (Nasdaq: FWHT), which supplies paid search results though a network of websites.
The AOL deal is a boost to the model and to Ingenio simply because of the online giant's reach: 22 million subscribers. It already processes more than 700 unique searches a month from more than 35 million unique users. While most originate from within AOL itself, the new partnership is intended to enhance the relevance of AOL Search to all Web users. Although no date has been announced to indicate when the ads will start appearing in searches, the results returned will actually be a mix of paid listings from both Ingenio and Google. The AOL portal has featured Google-powered search results -- both paid ads and relevance-based ones -- since 2002, and in 2003 they inked a multi-year deal.
America Online has refined other aspects of its search tools as well. Users can more easily sort results into different categories using technology AOL originally launched with its Pinpoint Shopping site. It will offer its own "snapshots" of Google's results that link to relevant editorial content or information from other websites, similar to the AskJeeves "smart search" feature.
With small businesses finding pay-per-call an attractive option, that makes the model the next big thing in local search.
posted by Dick Larkin at 2:19 PM
3 Comments:
Hello Dick,
Great posting on pay-per-call. I agree with you wholeheartedly about its importance to the local search market. My only comment on your posting is that you mentioned a list of names of companies providing this service, but you missed an important one: CIRXIT. Who're they and how do you pronounce the name? 1) They are the ones who beat out Ingenio and the rest at an in-depth evaluation done at Citysearch, and consequently are the exclusive providers of pay-per-call functionality to Citysearch. 2) CIRXIT is pronounced as "circuit". How do I know this/them? Simple, I work there.
Hello Dick,
Great posting on pay-per-call. I agree with you wholeheartedly about its importance to the local search market. My only comment on your posting is that you mentioned a list of names of companies providing this service, but you missed an important one: CIRXIT. Who're they and how do you pronounce the name? 1) They are the ones who beat out Ingenio and the rest at an in-depth evaluation done at Citysearch, and consequently are the exclusive providers of pay-per-call functionality to Citysearch. 2) CIRXIT is pronounced as "circuit". How do I know this/them? Simple, I work there.
Thanks.
I had a very interesting discussion with Erron Silverstein at Citysearch about Cirxit, and he even gave me the name of someone over there that I should speak with.
In the crush to gather info, I didn't get to contact them. Erron seemed very pleased with the service that CitySearch was receiving.
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