Pay Per Call services can be a confusing industry to search for online, and finding exactly what you need is difficult. Many companies offer Pay Per Call as a marketing platform, but PaidConnections caters to a special industry of businesses and professionals that are charging for their time and are offering their services by phone, video, and chat. Get paid to chat online and talk to your customers by phone and video using the Paid Connections platform. We take care of all the automated billing and calculate all the transactions, and provide detailed records and reports. Our user interface gives you a huge number of settings and controls as well as website building tools to help you create beautiful advisor profile pages and categories to help you keep ahead of the competition. Earning money by phone, chat, and video has never been this easy until we worked closely with hundreds of clients over the last decade to refine our platform and create a service that is leading the industry.
The term “Pay Per Call” has two completely different definitions.
The Original Meaning:
Up until 2005, the term Pay Per Call, also known as Premium Rate Phone Numbers, was originally made popular in the 80s with the 900 phone number industry. Companies would get a 900 (premium rate) number and they would get their customers to call and listen to recorded messages and information or sometimes speak with live operators such as psychic readers. The phone companies who host the 900 numbers would do the billing for these premium services and the customers were billed on their phone bill. They did not need to enter a credit card or any form of payment because the phone company would bill the customer based on a per minute rate established by the company providing the information or entertainment with recordings or live operators. Phone carriers eventually dropped out of the 900 number business starting in 2002 with AT&T and finally, Verizon was the last carrier to end 900 numbers in th US and it has remained unchanged ever since.
For more details on the end of 900 numbers please check out this article.
https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-1-900-number/
In the final years of 900 numbers, one company that was a big service provider for the Premium Rate Number industry was paypercall.com, which started in 1996. This partly leads to some confusion and debate today about the actual definition of Pay Per Call.
The Modern Meaning:
The newer and more popular definition of Pay Per Call was launched in 2005 by Ingenio. They trademarked the term PayPer Call for their newly launched marketing and bidding platform which was an adapted replication of Pay Per Click advertising models like Google’s Adwords.
Ivoca and Ringba are a couple of the marketing agencies that dominate the Pay Per Call Marketing industry today.
https://www.invoca.com/blog/pay-per-call-11-common-questions-answered
Companies such as paidconnections.com, paypercall.com, consulto.com, and a small handful of others offer Pay Per Call services of the original meaning, not the marketing agency platforms of the modern meaning. This service is also known as paid chat, paid communications, paid connections, and bill per call, just to name a few terms that describe the service.
These companies no longer use premium rate 900 numbers that bill the customers’ phone bills. Instead, they have built platforms that allow customers to pay for the calls by entering credit card information through an IVR phone system or they provide an online payment platform and will then dial out to the customer and the agent, then connects them in a live conversation. The call is timed by the platform and the call is billed to the customer based on the specified payment settings that are agreed to in advance. Today the more advanced platforms are incorporating online chat and video into the paid conversation model.
This type of service desperately needs a new universally accepted term. Back in 2005, when Ingenio trademarked Pay Per Call for their marketing platform, the billpercall.com developers rebranded their platform to differentiate between Pay Per Call Marketing, where the companies are paying for lead generated phone calls, and Bill Per Call, where the customer is paying for the call so they can get information or entertainment services from the business they are calling.
This is a relatively small niche industry without any massive companies that dominate. But that’s starting to change gradually since the Covid-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home and or lose their jobs and they are looking for new work-from-home opportunities.
In 2021 billpercall.com rebranded with a new platform that adds Paid Chat and Paid Video services to its offerings with the new name PaidConnections.com aka Paid Communications, LLC. This name is a better fit as the industry transitions to fewer phone calls and more chat and video communications.