Free Calls - An Ad Model Here?

I was not the least surprised to see this story from NYT. I knew it would happen sooner or later - that phone calls can be made free in return for ads, depending on whether the industry is daring enough to venture into it.

The NYT story is different, of course. It's about an iPhone app that gives you free calls if you are willing to listen to ads in exchange. If you want free calls, minus the ad, according to the story, you pay US$10 a month. You can read more here: Free Calls, if You Don’t Mind Ads.

I am wondering free call model of a different kind. The phone user subscribes to the phone service who engages advertisers for mobile ads. For each add displayed (giving the advertisers the eye-balls in terms of return-of-investment (ROI) ), the subscriber gets air time in exchange.

The benefit for the advertiser would be monumental since mobile phone companies have the statistics of all subscribers and can zoom in by any category they have identified in their existing registration system, such as income-level, race, age groups, or even locality. Imagine the reach it would give the advertiser using this mode to target its users. Users may argue that they would not like adverts but if they finance their phone bills, what is there to complaint?

How it will work can be similar to that story in NYT. Well targetted ads wait in queue at the network base. Once the subscriber dials a number, and gets connected, he listens to the ad for say, 20 seconds, before being allowed through. As this was going on, the recipient of the call is also notified by the computer about the caller details and his call so that the recipient does not hang up in frustration.