Just got a phone call (yep, voice! In this day and age?) from a company wanting to buy advertising on my ottopress.com website. Did a reverse lookup on the phone number, and the company seems legit enough, for a “Search Engine and Advertising Network”. Not somebody I’d advertise for though, even if I did advertising.

For the record, I don’t do paid advertising on my sites. I do, however, accept bribes and free stuff, so feel free to contact me about any of those.

I know how they got my number, of course. I don’t use privacy on my domain registrations. However, I’ve now gone through and changed that information to have my Google Voice number, which allows me to whitelist my contacts more easily. Unknown callers there can just go straight to my voicemail instead.

Still, I have to wonder how effective this sort of tactic is… Cold calling a site owner to see if you can buy ad space? Does that really work? Anybody else experience this or have any comments?