In-call Audio Advertising

In order to offer free calling, we here at RingBranch must subsidize the cost of each phone call that you make or receive with audio advertising. When you call into RingBranch to make a phone call, you typically will hear 1 to 2 short audio ads before we connect your phone call.   Additionally, if you give out one of the RingBranch access numbers and ask your contacts to call you via RingBranch, then the person calling you will hear 1 or 2 short audio ads before we connect the call to you.   

Also, if your call exceeds an expense limit for us, we reserve the right to gently interrupt your phone call with additional audio advertising in the neighborhood of 15 to 30 seconds that all parties on the line would hear.  Without getting into the details of the economics of this, it should be fairly obvious why we have to do this--we have real and significant costs each time you make a phone call. If you make a 45 minute phone call, that could cost us much more than the revenue that we make from playing 2 ads at the beginning of the phone call.

Some of our users have voiced their opinion that they don't think we should make non RingBranch users hear ads.  In other words, their opinion is if someone is calling a RingBranch user, that person should not have to hear the ad, only the RingBranch user should have to hear ad(s).      Well, we understand where you are coming from. And if we can come up with a solution that works technically and economically that will remedy the situation, we will implement it.  Until we do, though, we need to keep our current solution in place.    The alternative would be to eliminate the ability to receive phone calls and we think this is the worse of the 2 options.

If you have suggestions on how we can navigate this issue, please let us know. We are all ears!

Thanks for supporting RingBranch.

Comments

[tom]

could you set up the outbound calling portion of ringbranch so that users have the option of calls being cut off instead having an ad inserted. we could than call one more time again listening to two ads without having to involve the other party.

also could you elaborate on the situations in which an ad would come on in 5 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes. is there some formula that you could share with the users to make the service more predictable?

[Allen]

Tom:

Thanks for the comments and sugggestions. In your first question/suggestion where you said: "could you set up the outbound calling portion of ringbranch so that users have the option of calls being cut off instead having an ad inserted. we could than call one more time again listening to two ads without having to involve the other party."

Yes, this is a good idea and we will try implementing something like this. We could provide some sort of audible beep/tone that only the caller (and not the callee) would hear. This tone would provide notice that an ad is about to interrupt the call and to hang up if desired.

Regarding your second question where you asked: "also could you elaborate on the situations in which an ad would come on in 5 minutes as opposed to 15 minutes. is there some formula that you could share with the users to make the service more predictable?"

Honestly, we haven't figured all of this out yet and don't have a formula per se. This is a work in progress. Basically, our thought process is this--if one specific call costs us $.03 a minute and another one costs us $.005 a minute, then we are obviously going to allow the latter one to go longer without playing an ad as it costs us less money.