[Asterisk-Users] Demo phones with advertisement announcements

[trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com]

On Sat, 2005-04-23 at 07:56 +1130, Craig wrote:
> A few years ago there was a company that set up in Australia offering
> free long distance calls, they played an add to you at the beginning and
> then every so often.
> 
> Came out with a lot of fanfare and disappeared pretty quickly.
> 
In america there was a company broadway that did the same thing.
Aparently people didnt want to listen to a bunch of ads for 15 minutes
(and it would interrorgate you with 'press number X' after each ad to
make sure you werent just cueing minutes).  When you place a call if the
person didnt answer or it was busy you had to hang up and start all
over, minutes were not saved.  They did direct call the company doing
the advertisement when listening to the ad if the person wanted to try
buy the product.

The idea seemed to be ok, although advertisers may not go for it since
its hardly targeted.  The implementation was horrible, if the call
doesnt go through you should be able to try a different number.  

I knew a lot of people that would use that during idle time waiting for
friends and what not to get home and would then call.  In america now it
cant sell well becuase mobile phones are incredibly cheap and most if
not all offer unlimited long distance for $20 or less per month and
unlimited nights and weekends.

To compete with that would be difficult to say the least.


> There was also a couple of people that pushed free dialup internet in
> return for users having to view a certain amount of their advertising.
> Unfortunately the business models didn't stack up and they went belly
> up.
> 
In america free.org did dialup for free and got money based on access
charges (the fees that phone companies pay each other any time calls go
from one network to another).  The advertisement based ISPs in america
came later, and went away.  No one wanted to see them to get what they
could pay $10/mo to have without the ads.  

free.org went under once phone companies blacklisted their dialup
numbers due to excessive fraud (I think figures put fraud at about 90%
of all calls).  Once no one could call, they had no revenue.


The reasons that some of these companies went under were lack of
planning on the user interface part, or lack of availability (free.org
only had 1 city with numbers).  

I wouldnt imagine it would be hard to implement this in asterisk,
however making it work so users are happy, lowering fraudulent callers
(see recent litigation against google, yahoo, askjeeves, findwhat and
others about fradulent clicks on ad banners), and other such things is
the challenge.  

AT&T also placed advertisements in their calling card plans that they
gave soldiers in the middle east.  They did this to avoid access charges
(if its an 'informational service' there are no access charges) which
the FCC didnt approve of.  Basically a soldier would call into the
system, hear a short ad and then their call would be placed.  

-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
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