Listen To Ads, Earn Minutes On Jajah
Nick Gonzalez
14 comments »
Ad supported telephony has been a bit of a hot topic in telephony. Jingle Networks plans on ads supporting for Free 411. Virgin launched an ad supported phone service last year. Blyk and ThePudding are two new startups that recently launched their own phone-based ad solutions. Now VOIP provider Jajah is also offering the ad-option to earn free telephony. Eventually, they hope to bring the model to other phone providers as well in an AdSense-like solution.
Jajah is teaming up with advertising network Oridian to let users pay for minutes by listening to targeted advertisements. It’s an opt-in system where users hear and see very targeted advertising content and receive credit in their JAJAH accounts for each message. Ads are targeted based on the phone’s location. For example, “If you own a furniture store that you want to introduce to your local community, your messages will be played to your prospective customers next door”, as founder Roman Scharf explains. The messages will play above the ring tone right before the call starts similar to the example embedded below.
Since Oridian is an international ad network that helps US sites monetize international traffic, I can’t imagine they’ll be focusing on your cross town calls, but rather the long distance international ones a VOIP provider effectively delivers for local calling rates (you still have to pay for minutes from your telco). Jajah says these ads will allow users to earn back their entire phone bill, or even make money too.
To make money back, you’ll have to listen to ads worth more than Jajah’s calling charges. Virgin’s Sugar Mama ad supported option lets users earn a minute for each minute of advertising heard. Jajah’s VOIP network has a significantly lower cost base costing at most three to four cents per minute to users on long distance calls. This makes it more feasible to support through advertising compared to standard phone time earned on Virgin, which may not make them money, but provide an effective rebate for price sensitive users willing to work for it.
With a Facebook app soon to launch
Now that is interesting. I onder whether they will give ads for incoming calls too…
not a bad idea
but the stoy in the headline should be
alibaba delivering 200% in the ipo
rc
trading tennis blog
not a bad idea but
the story in the headline
should be alibaba ipo
td
trading tennis
Nick, one company you need to mention is Talkster, this is exactly what they are up to.
Those Virgin people are is nuts. I don’t know who these marketing duds are imagining is going to tolerate a one to one ratio of advertising to minutes. In my estimation, the only poor souls desperate enough to submit themselves to abuse like that –– just to save mere pennies –– would surely be far too destitute and impoverished to be in ANY advertiser’s demographic, let alone Kodak, with their expensive Easyshare Glossy Prints.
And gosh, at the moment anybody can hook their FREE GrandCentral number to their FREE Gizmo number and get FREE incoming and outgoing calls already via their PC or Mac. So….
Besides Jajah is moving too fast here. Jajah needs to fix their business account email ‘add user’ form before rushing on to other projects. It’ doesn’t accept email addresses longer than 27 characters. And when that’s fixed I want a virtual PBX first.
Wow, am I back in 2000?
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Click these ads! Earn Money NOW!
Nick - correction: Roman Scharf is NOT the CEO of Jajah. Trevor Healy is.
And your servers still need to have their clocks turned an hour back
It’s an interesting proposition, but is this really a sustainable method of revenue?
I think outside of a subscription this is one of the few ways to
monetize from your user base. Unfortunately I think most people will
be annoyed by it. Audio ads (esp in the case) is much more intrusive
than banner ads. With telcommunications pricing falling rapidly I
expect most people will pay rather than listen.
I’d love someone to explain clearly how the economics of ad-supported telephony work. I’m convinced they don’t, at least in the case of termination to PSTN and mobile numbers. Let’s say (and for most start-ups in this space, this assumption is in itself a stretch) you can negotiate your wholesale termination rate down to $0.005, in which case the cost of revenue on a five-minute call is $0.025. In the case of a callback scenario where both legs of the call are being carried by the service provider, it’s $0.05. To serve 1,000 ads in that model costs $25 - $50.
Even in the fantasy land business plan scenario you’d be unlikely to assume a $25 average CPM, and even if you could achieve this CPM rate, all that means is you have a gross margin of zero and you’re haemorrhaging cash on operating the network and the other costs of running the business.
Didn’t Techcrunch write on a company last month called Voodoo Vox that was doing this too. They’re doing it as an audio network? Or something. What I really remember was they found Ampd condoms when they took over their space.
Whatever…you pay for my phone bill and I’ll listen to your ads. Promise.