Bronte Media

Greg Yardley has news of Google testing pay per call advertising. Well, click to call to anyway.

I have never got the point of click to call; it just seems like a poor consumer experience. Why put the consumer 3-4 clicks away and then wait by their phone? Why not just put up a trackable phone number and let them dial that instead?

Either way, it’s great news for everyone except those like Ingenio and Jambo who maintain pay per call ad networks of their own. The reason is that after testing it out, Google will launch it across their AdSense network next year and call it something different and claim that they are doing something new and then Business Week and the New York Times will write fawning profiles of how the service is changing the ad industry while the true innovators like Ingenio get written out of the annals of history and oh, and don’t forget, the writers will say, the phone companies and the yellow pages firms and any other big media firm are fucked.

Oh the bitterness.

But back to why it’s good. Publishers will be able to tap into pay per call advertising through Google and mix their own direct sales of pay per call advertising with the network advertising of Google, Ingenio and others just like they do with cost per click advertising.