History
- August 2004 - a Jupiter Research study commissioned by Ingenio showed that 48% of participating businesses were interested in Pay-per-Call and that they would pay 5 to 15 times more for a phone call over a click.
- September 2004 - Ingenio introduced Pay-per-Call in North America, via Miva. Other early market entrants in the US included (in no particular order) VoiceStar, Estara, SPG solutions, and ThinkingVoice.
- April 2005 - AOL introduced Pay Per Call ads in the US and UK-based Callgen launched Pay-per-Call in Europe.
- September 2005 - MIVA extended their Pay-per-Call offering to the UK, using Ingenio’s technology, (Miva later suspended their Pay-per-Call offering in the UK). In September 2005 Thomson Directories also announced plans to enter the Pay-per-Call market.
- Later in 2005 - Google tested (but have not rolled out) Pay-per-Call as Google Connect. Yahoo! started experimenting with the model at around the same time, (purportedly using Ingenio’s platform).
- February 2006 - Kelsey Group projected US "pay-per-phone call" revenues to reach $3.7 billion by 2010 (Pay-per-Call forecasts were initially considered “bullish” by some in the industry, but over time have proved to be “directionally accurate”). According to the Kelsey Group’s finding at the time, over 70% of SMBs would prefer a phone call than a click in a performance-advertising model.
- March 2006 - TradeDoubler announced its acquisition of Pay-per-Call start up Advertigo. In January 2007 TradeDoubler introduced a Pay-per-Call service called ‘td Talk’ to their Affiliate network. (in 2009, Tradedoubler merged ‘td Talk’ with their ‘td Pull’ affiliate network and renamed the combined offering as ‘td Affiliate’).
- October 2006 - Estara acquired by ATG for an estimated $48m
- April 2007 - Skype launched ‘Skype Prime’ a Pay-per-Call service in Beta.
- Summer 2007 - Google acquired telephony capabilities via Grand Central for an estimated $50m.
- August 2007 - VoiceStar acquired by Marchex for an estimated $28m.
- November 2007 - Ingenio acquired by AT&T for more than $300m.
- July 2010 - Skype launched a new Pay-per-Call system, using Marchex (VoiceStar).
- August 2011 - Google converts all AdWords phone numbers to click-to-call numbers.
- July 2012 - Google reported it is driving 15 million calls a month to US advertisers. Forbes estimated that calls in this model “could explode as more businesses understand the benefits of pay per call versus other forms of advertising” and that “Pay per call could be 10x bigger than pay per click”.
- January 2013 - Search Engine Watch article expects US mobile ad revenues could reach $4.2 billion in 2013, and Mobile ad rates to rebound most pronouncedly in ad formats such as Pay-per-Call.
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