The big news in the telecom and advertising industries yesterday was AT&T's acquisition of Ingenio.

Website Magazine has discussed the concept of pay-per-call before (here, here and here) but let's start with an explanation. With Pay-Per-Call, advertisers receive phone calls from prospects and are charged for each call they receive. Advocates of the concept argue that while similar to pay-per-click advertising in that you bid an amount to receive a phone call from interested parties, there is less opportunity for click-fraud. Pay-per-call solutions are ideal for local advertisers who require telephone prospects as opposed to Web visitors alone. In my honest opinion, pay-per-call never really took off as it was expected to because of higher bid prices than local advertisers could afford (and of course issues with sales prospecting), but with support from AT&T and their connections in and support of the IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) landscape, things may turn around.

While Ingenio has done an exceptional job of building partnerships with several notable ad platforms (Miva) and Yellow Pages sites (SuperPages), there are some alternatives you should be aware of. While the following solutions may not offer the whole package as compared to Ingenio, here's the short list of those that have caught my attention:

VoiceStar : ZiffLeads : FlyingSpider : Thinking Voice : eStara : Call Source