976 Numbers

Plenty.
Just wait. Now listen, do you know how this business of 976 numbers
works? It's sort of like this: What you do is you go to Ma Bell and
tell her you want to have some 976 numbers. Then you arrange to buy
or lease some phone answering equipment. All this will cost you a few
thou. O.K., after you've got all this in place, what you do is you
run ads or mail letters or somehow entice people to call your 976
number to hear a recorded message.

The
numbers go something like this: First, the customer (he who does the
dialing) must pay his normal phone charges. What this means is that
if your 976 number is located in the 212 area code and he is calling
from area code 213, then he must pay a long distance toll charge.
However, if he is calling from the same area code, there is, of
course, no long distance charge.

Furthermore,
he must also pay a fee (usually about $2.00) for the privilege of
listening to the info on the 976 recorded message.

And
what happens to this $2.00 fee? Aha, I thought you'd never ask. Hear
this: The fee is collected by Ma Bell (it is added to the caller's
phone bill) and Ma keeps about $.50 of it and sends the rest (about
$1.50) to you!

Getting
interesting, isn't it?

Let
us press on. Remember that centerfold girl who invited me to call her
so she could tell me how hot she was for my bod? Do you know that
what she told me after her recorded message got me all hot and
bothered? Well, listen to this! What she told me at the end of her
recording is that, if I wanted to talk to her live and, if I had a
credit card, I could call another number and would have the hottest
conversation of my life!

Oh
yeah! Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

Hold
on, all ye who would think ill of me. I'm not getting excited about
all that heavy breathing; I'm getting excited about those numbers!

Let's
see now, if some of those centerfold girls get 500,000 calls per day,
that's uh, about 750,000.00 to he who owns the 976 numbers. And I
wonder how many of those people with credit cards get excited enough
to call and talk to a live girl? What do you think? 20%? 10%? 5%?
Naw. That seems too high to me. Let's base our numbers on a 1%
"conversion".