Deal called big milestone by Ingenio Ingenio Inc., a provider of pay-per-phone-call online advertising and technology, has expanded its advertisement-distribution network by signing up InfoSpace Inc., which offers Web and mobile search as well as online directory services.Expanding its network of distributors makes its advertising platform more attractive to advertisers, so Ingenio is focused on signing up partners, said Marc Barach, the company’s chief marketing officer.“As the network grows, that’s more value to the advertisers. They want leads, plain and simple: a large stream of qualified customers coming to them,” Barach said. In addition to InfoSpace, other companies that carry the ads Ingenio sells include America Online Inc., UDS Directory Corp.’s Go2, Interchange Corp.’s Local.com, Miva Inc. and Marchex Inc.He characterized the InfoSpace deal, announced Wednesday, as “a big milestone” due to the significant traffic that flows through its network of Web sites. According to market research firm comScore Networks Inc., InfoSpace ranked sixth in July among U.S. search engines, in terms of queries submitted, with 0.9 percent. Google Inc. ranked first with 36.5 percent and Yahoo Inc. second with 30.5 percent.InfoSpace will begin displaying pay-per-phone-call ads sold by Ingenio in the first quarter of next year, Barach said. The plan is to have the ads appear in InfoSpace Web properties such as Switchboard.com, which is an engine for finding local-business information, and Dogpile.com, which aggregates results from various major search engines. InfoSpace also provides search services to mobile carriers. Pay per phone call, an emerging online ad model based on the wildly popular pay-per-click ads, is currently being tested by Google and Yahoo. Verizon Communications Inc. began offering it in October. Ingenio, a 95-employee company based in San Francisco, is considered a pioneer in this market. It began developing its system in 2003 and went live with it in 2004.Like pay-per-click ads, these ads typically appear along with search engine results they are related to. Unlike pay-per-click ads, which take users to advertisers’ Web sites when clicked upon, pay-per-phone call ads link users and advertisers by phone.As in the pay-per-click model, advertisers only pay when the ad leads a user to contact them by phone. The Kelsey Group recently forecasted that in 2009 spending on this type of online ad could reach US$1.4 billion. Also following the pay-per-click method, the cost of pay-per-call ads typically is determined via an auction process. The larger an advertiser’s bid for a search keyword or search category, the higher its ad appears on the list of related ads that a search engine serves up after a user enters a search query.Most Ingenio bids fall within a range of $2 and $50, but the average bid is between $9 and $10, Barach said. Technology Industry