Stumpedia Launches New Advertising Model – Pay Per Chat

Stumpedia, a global democratic search engine powered by the people, for the people is launching a new internet advertising model. “Pay Per Chat” allows consumers to post short text messages in the form of questions or needs which are then sent to advertisers who can respond to those requests.

The service officially launched on March 12, 2009.

You may be thinking this is simply another pay per click (PPC) advertising model but you’d be wrong. Pay Per Chat actually provides an alternative to the traditional PPC model.

With traditional PPC models such as AdWords, advertisers bid on keywords which then display for related searches and pay for clicks-thrus to their web site. Stumpedia’s Pay-Per-Chat model matches consumers inquires to advertisers in real-time. Users are presented with a non-obstructive dialog box every time they perform a keyword search that matches an advertiser’s business and are given the opportunity to directly contact those advertisers with just one simple click.

Consumers get personalized responses in the form of price quotes and answers from advertisers that compete for their business within seconds, not hours or days. Advertisers get targeted online sales leads from real people with real consumer needs and pay only for the leads they respond to.

How It Works – Consumers

First of all, in order to use the service as either a consumer or advertiser or both, you must be logged in to Stumpedia. Not a member? Sign up is a breeze and free. Simply enter a valid email address, choose a user name and wait for the validation email.

Once signed in, simply conduct a search. If the keyword(s) you searched for has been targeted by an advertiser, you will see a box appear to the right of the regular search results (shown below). It also indicates the number of advertisers that are ready to respond to your inquiry.

In my scenario, I replaced the default text with “Need quote on SEO.” I did this because I had already signed up as an advertiser, using “SEO” as one of my targeted terms. In this way I can see what the advertiser end looks like as well as the consumer end.

If an advertiser responds to you, you will not only receive an email from them, you will also see the message displayed in the “Messages” section of your Stumpedia profile.

How It Works – Advertisers

Signing up as an advertiser is as simple as ABC. Visit http://www.stumpedia.com/advertise/ or simply click on the “Advertise Here!” link that appears where the Pay Per Chat box typically appears. Enter the keywords you want to target and hit submit. It’s that simple!

As you can see from the screenshot above, I’ve entered some terms related to search and social media marketing. Remember that you do have to be a Stumpedia member and be logged in to activate yourself as an advertiser.

Communication works the same way for advertisers as it does for consumers. Inquiries will show up in the “Messages” section of your Stumpedia profile. They will also be sent to the email address you used to initially sign up as a Stumpedia member.

You can then respond within Stumpedia itself or via the email you received.

As an incentive and a little economic stimulus to help jump-start the global economy, Stumpedia is offering free advertising for all of 2009. I’ll say that again – FREE advertising through the end of this year! That should be incentive enough to at least try and experiment with the service. I know I am going to take advantage of this generous offer.

Pay Per Chat Features

Here are some of the current as well as future features included in the Pay Per Chat model:

• Mobile version available
• SMS support (text messaging)
• Users can post anonymous requests
• Users can limit the number of responses they receive per request (future)
• Users can block advertisers (future)
• Advertisers can block users (future)

I like the fact that I can access the service on my Blackberry a well as the control Stumpedia provides both the advertiser and the consumer.

I originally reviewed Stumpedia in April of last year. At that time I pointed out that Stumpedia is essentially a human-powered search engine with a social aspect to it. In other words, Stumpedia allows content producers to submit and profit from their work and then allows the search community to determine relevancy of search results. They do not depend on bots, algorithms, or company insiders to make decisions on the relevance and ranking of search results.

The Pay Per Chat advertising platform is equally as simple. Advertisers can very quickly decide which terms they want to target without having to create multiple ad groups and creatives. Users searching Stumpedia will only see the Pay Per Chat box if an advertiser has selected the specific term the user searched for.