Adsafety Media & Advertising Company Solutions

Safety in Numbers

Firefly Telecom works with many online classified websites. These classified sites are traditional buy/sell type propositions and the increasingly local recommendation classified sites, where the website community members recommend a service in the user’s current location. More and more these sites are driven by iPhone and android phone apps and act as a sort of “radar” to find the service that the user wants. Although web based booking, ordering or just inquiring is growing as it is convenient and quick for the user, a lot of the time they need to phone someone. Many sites use special numbers that achieve a number of things: Privacy – where the real number is substituted for an “ad safety number” so the user does not have to disclose their true number. Examples range from dating site members to straight classified ad sites. The ad safety number protects the site member from other advertisers trying to sell them the same thing as they are trying to sell Generates revenue for the site owners that help pay for the cost of operating the site. This is especially important in the free ads business.

I didn’t sign up to be a data entry person

Many companies that provide numbers expect the site owners to do just this, where the site owners get a block numbers and have to manually distribute a unique number to each of their members which could be thousands of people. To add insult to injury, they expect the site owner to add a unique number to all new members who sign up! Fire Fly Telecom takes a different approach. Rather than expect busy site owners to just get on with it, we provide automation of the process – call it auto number allocation – where our comprehensive list of in house APIs talk directly to the web site. So when a user signs up and as part of the registration process fills in their primary contact phone number, the unique number is allocated and the user gets an email to inform them of the new ad safety number. Simple. But what about the existing site members, they need number allocation as well. We have thought of this and we use tried and tested scripting to allocate numbers to these members quickly. We can literally allocate thousands of numbers in a few hours.

Is this because we are clever?

No, not at all. We decided a long time ago to develop useful business applications in-house to add value to our 3 million numbers. This gives us total control over the whole process and means that unlike lots of other carrier’s they have to scope out the application with a third party and whether the auto allocation ever see’s the light of day is anybody’s guess. Once you start using their numbers, you are committed – but are they? We have worked with some large site owners and built this capability from the ground up as we understand the whole process and can implement very quickly.

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