Techcrunch has the news that Pudding Media just raised a substantial round of funding from Opus Capital and BRM Capital. Pudding is offering free phone calls throughout North America in exchange for showing you ads on their website. The catch is that the ads are targeted based on extracting key words from your conversation in real time.
The blogs and the general press had a field day ripping in to these guys back in September when they first launched. Here is my post reviewing some of the feedback. Om called it “inane”. My local news called it “creepy”.
Mostly people are focusing on the privacy aspect of the service. I think the bigger flaw is that long distance in North America is already cheap enough that most people don’t care about it. Expanding into international calling is an obvious move for them. Although then the challenge of properly targeting the ads gets much harder too.
I think the web-based version of this service is just a showcase for the technology and that the real potential is connecting this with the mobile experience. Everyone is trying to figure out how you make mobile advertising work. That little screen gets a *lot* of eyeball time. From the perspective of an attention economy, that’s a mother lode that hasn’t been tapped. Further, mobile calling costs *are* still high enough for people to care.
So to everyone condemning this as a foolish investment: don’t be distracted by the immediate implementation, that’s not the main event.
You got it nailed here Shai. There seems to have been some forrest for the trees runoff in the media on this opp…