1-800-FREE411 Sells Out Half Its Ad Inventory For the Year, Growth Steadies.
Erick Schonfeld
17 comments »
What’s not to love about free 411 calls? Jingle Networks, which operates 1-800-FREE411, says it has sold out its entire inventory of sponsorship ads for 2008. These are ten-second audio spots that you listen to before you get your free directory assistance from national sponsors like AMC Theaters, Earthlink, Cablevision, McDonald’s, Miller Brewing, and Nationwide. Jingle has actually sold only half of its inventory, though, since there are two ad spots per call—one for national sponsors and one for local/targeted ads. It is the first spot that is sold out. But selling half of your inventory for the year by the end of January is not a bad place to be. (The second ad spot is typically sold out one to two months in advance and more on a cost-per-call basis).
1-800-FREE411 is getting 20 million directory-assistance call a month, which is up 18 percent from last March. The company says that gives it a 6 percent market share of the 3.8 billion total 411 calls placed in the U.S. annually (up from 4 percent about a year ago). 1-800-FREE411 is more of a mobile and pure telephone play. It’s Website, where you can also get free directory numbers and is integrated with Skype, is basically an afterthought. Traffic to the site has declined from a peak of about 850,000 U.S. visitors a month a year ago to less than 100,000 a month, according to comScore. But then, you can get phone numbers on the Web simply by searching Google.
Parent company Jingle Networks has raised nearly $75 million in four rounds from First Round Capital, Goldman Sachs, IDG Ventures Boston, and Hearst.
$75 million dollar for 1-800 number. You must be kidding…
I avoid anything “free” labels.
1.) Telemarketing calls
2.) Email spams
3.) Junk Mail spams.
This is another Techcrunch spam written by Erick.
We know which one is spam. I want to give you one star for this.
Is there voting star polls for techcrunch ?
Say what you will about Jingle, but the fact is they are providing a service for free that used to cost between $1-2. It’s a perfect example of ad-supported telephony.
It may not be of interest to all people, but 20M folks a month find it of value.
Ad-supported telephony is coming, in a variety of forms, shapes, and sizes. Jingle is just the start. If someone if offering you a free or cheaper telco service and is doing so via intelligent ad support, it’s a trade a lot of people will make.
I agree, I’d much rather listen to a 10 second spot than pay $1 or more just to get a phone number. I think their model is pretty brilliant.
I’m surprised Erick didn’t mention the other contender in the realm of free directory assistance- 1-800-GOOG-411. It’s all voice recognition, and I’ve never heard an ad.
@5 - I agree, I’m surprised he didn’t mention them either. I read an interesting post not long ago that talked about how GOOG 411 isn’t really what is seems though. Marissa Meyer of Google is quoted as saying, “Whether or not free-411 is a profitable business unto itself is yet to be seen. I myself am somewhat skeptical. The reason we really did it is because we need to build a great speech-to-text model … that we can use for all kinds of different things, including video search.”
According to Marissa, 1-800-GOOG-411 is simply a tool Google uses to get large amounts of voice data to train its speech recognition algorithms. They are not approaching it with a business mindset and won’t advertise it as such.
the reason big funded companies are covered because they are pay per post coverage?
no goog411, no care.
“Its website”
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What was so funny was trying to call FREE 411 on a Verizon Pay phone and getting a block. Yes, Verizon will NOT allow you to call that number - however, they do allow you to call Google and Microsoft’s free directory assistance.
The irony of it all is that those other services Connect You Free of Charge
Microsoft - 1-800-CALL411
Google - 1-800-GOOG411
20 Million calls per month?
Impossible!
20.000.000 / 30 days= 666K calls PER DAY
even per year
20.000.000 / 365 days =54794 Calls PER DAY
Either you wrote the false number OR that company gave you wrong informations.
“What’s not to love…”?
Obnoxious ads, that’s what.
I’ve completely dropped Free411 in favor of Goog411 or looking things up on my (hacked) RAZR’s crude browser. I used to use Free411 all the time, but the ads started to get really time consuming and annoying.
Interestingly, their success could easily kill Free411. The more “ad inventory” they sell, the more their users get annoyed by ads and start looking for alternatives.
I’ve been using for years a Directory Assistant application on my Palm Treo that works like a charm. The developer recently changed the name to tryDA
- No annoying 10 sec. audio spots
- No voice UN-recognition
- No eye piercing maps
- Just clean text listings
Let me know if any one else has seen this one http://www.tryda.com
Cheers
I agree with No 5 - why call this service and waste your time listening to an ad? I use 1-800-GOOG-411 all the time - it’s FREE, I’ve never heard an ad, and they connect you.
hmmm..the fact that traffic is down is not a good thing at all. this idea peaked and the competition is showing up. that said, its interesting but surely not the future…can you say vonage?