Another day, another stream
of sales calls

This time Thomson Local trying to tempt me retry their New Connections service - £456 for a predicted 424 leads - I don't think so somehow.

The next one will most likely be a call from a firm in India offering me the opportunity to hand over all my work to a team of self-taught teenage hackers. Or it could be from a telecoms company who can save me money on my line rental, not to mention incur a penalty fee from my current provider, then overcharge me and invoice me multiple times for services not ordered, and route all my calls through a decommissioned Russian spy satellite causing a weird echo and persistent Internet outages.

But no - it was from the online directory Scoot. 'Who?' I hear you ask, and it's a good question as if no-one is using it why would I want to buy a listing for £199? I should have simply said 'no thanks' and ended the call but I got annoyed and started making my usual point about numbers. In this instance, if I spent £199 and received 100 click-throughs I'd be paying about £2 per click which is way over the odds. I don't think I'd get more than a few clicks a month - Yell.com only generated a few hundred clicks over 3 years and they're a much bigger brand than Scoot.

The lady I spoke to couldn't tell me how many people search Scoot for 'Web design' and 'Cambridge' each month but said she would find out and call me back this afternoon, and then she proceeded to bang on about having a video-photo-montage with a voiceover. It's tempting to switch to answer-phone mode...

It's after 2pm and the Scoot woman has been on the phone again. Apparently they handle a few thousand searches per month for "Web design" and "Cambridge". Call me an old cynic but I don't believe the numbers. I contacted one of their existing advertisers after our earlier chat and they told me that the only contact that had had from their Scoot listing was me. So that will be a 'no' then.