By Marc Jarrett

YNOT – At about this time last year, I needed the services of a family lawyer. Eventually I found, met and paid one, but I remember thinking at the time that I would have preferred to have paid on a per-minute basis for a telephone consultation if such a service existed. Well, soon it just might.

Thanks to cloud-based voice over internet protocol technology offered by companies like MyPhoneSite.com, a new form of per-minute phone chat now allows professionals, counselors and experts in any field to create their own telephone consultancy or entertainment hotline. This new form of pay-per-minute billing differs from traditional premium-rate numbers in several important ways.

First off, the caller does not dial a premium-rate number. Instead, he or she enters their phone number into a website, and the system then automatically connects the two parties.

Secondly, the caller does not pay the phone company for the time he spends talking. Instead, callers use their credit or debit cards to pre-pay for minutes in blocks. This means the person offering the service will not have to wait the typical 45 days or longer for payment, as was the case with old-style 800 and 900 numbers.

In keeping with the freemium economy, those interested in operating their own phone sites need not part with any money upfront. Thanks to VoIP, set-up fees and monthly number rentals have been consigned to the history books. And most VoIP phone site providers offer revenue-split billing mechanisms, so even the aggravation of establishing an individual billing account is long gone.

Furthermore, phone site owners can charge whatever they wish per minute and are not constrained by the fixed-rate, line-dependent tariffs of days gone by.

Perhaps the biggest advantage afforded by this new per-minute phone platform is that users can reach out to a global audience, not just a local or national one. This means professionals who are fed up with “difficult-to-bill” telephone consultations can point existing and prospective customers to their new phone site and reconnect with them that way.

The old saying “time is money” holds true now more than ever. By deploying next-generation VoIP technology, those with something of value to say now can trade the former for the latter on an ad-hoc basis.

In this way, porn stars can reach out and offer one-on-one sessions away from all that internet clutter via a ubiquitous device that everybody has — a phone. And thanks to social media, spreading the word to a targeted audience has never been easier.

Next-generation pay-per-minute phone sites allow anyone who can add value to a call to benefit from the familiarity of a device dating back to the pre-web era whilst capitalizing on the technology and free advertising opportunities abundant in the Internet Age.

Marc Jarrett has been a consultant and facilitator in the pay-per-call industry since 1994 and currently works with several companies within the alternative-billing space. He may be contacted by email.