The problem with ad supported calls (Jajah, Talkster, and others) is the lack of advertising focus. The advertiser does not have the luxury of choosing a particular demographic profile to target. I interacted with VoodooVox CEO J. Scott Hamilton recently (interview coming up in a week or so … VoodooVox is the Doubleclick of the voice world). They are handling the problem by using an IVR engine to record answers to a couple of questions which they ask upfront at the start of the call. While that could work for enterprise grade scenarios like radio stations and call center, it is unlikely to scale nicely for service providers like Jajah whose customers are large in number and call more often.
I think rather than having someone like VoodoVox do the job for you, a service provider looking to monetize his call volume needs to be proactive in collecting all that information such as the gender, address, profession, what income group your caller/subscriber falls in etc etc.
Anyway, the modest idea of the day is to pay you customers to make a call, and not just stop at offering it for free. In return for the payment you can ask the customers to update their demographic profile on (say) six monthly basis. You further ask them to answer some consumer market research related questions every six months. Add in some network marketing incentives and you have a Data-Bank-Meets-Telephony business.
That business model, I believe, will work better for ad supported telephony service. And you would be ahead of something like the Google Phone project.
Now let us see how much money can be made here. I have come across ad rates as high as 4 cents per call. If you split that as 1 cent going to the agent, 1 cent to the customer, you can keep 2 cents per call. An average US consumer makes 300 calls per month. It would be plausible to assume that the consumer would make more calls if it is getting paid to do so! Let us say the call-and-get-paid customer makes an average of 500 calls per month. That would translate into 10 dollars per month per customer. And that is higher than $5.99 that Vonage charges under its cheapest monthly plan.
The customer might be getting only $5 per month, but that is a customer at the lowest end of your network link. Network marketing incentives could mean hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars per month for someone who refers several customers.