eAdvertising: pay per click or per exposure?
The internet has without any doubt grown rapidly in the past decade, attracting billions of visitors daily to the world wide web. Which in return initiated an opportunity for advertisers to expose their brand, products or services to billions of online visitors world-wide on a daily basis by advertising on websites.
One of the competitive factors of online advertising is the fact that the advert is working or accessible every second of the 24 hours throughout the cyberspace.
Social networking websites, blogs, news websites and search engines are some of the top kinds of websites that attracts majority of online visitors daily.
In this article my center of interest is more on the fairness of the two popular advertising billing options (both on the publisher and advertiser) rather than the advertiser and the most suitable option for their advertising campaign only.
The two most used advertising space billing system on the web today is either charged ‘per-click’ or the advertiser is charged a ‘fixed’ monthly amount.
Pay per click (PPC) is an advertising model where advertisers only pay (for and) when a user actually clicks on an ad to visit the advertiser’s website.
While ‘per click’ billing is the best option for the advertiser, I believe to some extend it’s a bit unfair on the publisher. Take print magazines and newspapers for example, advertisers are charged for the exposure not on how many readers takes action to their advert.
Shouldn’t the same apply for online advertising, shouldn’t online publishers also be remunerated for the exposure they provide the advertisers’ brand with?
Brand exposure goes beyond the time frame of a particular advertiser’s campaign, A visitor might not find an advert appealing because they aren’t in need of the advertised product or service then BUT because of the advert the visitor might utilize an advertiser’s products / service later should the need arise.
For example I’ve been exposed to a lot of Apple mac resellers’ adverts, I didn’t find the ads appealing only because I wasn’t in a need or looking for a new mac but now (after seeing the ads) I know where exactly to go when the time to upgrade my tools of trade (computer and softwares) comes.
I would love to hear your views on the matter as a (potential) sponsor and/or as a publisher, so please share your thoughts by commenting on this post.
In a fair world the amount paid to the publisher should average out to more or less the same for pay per click or pay per exposure.
This is a brilliant thought, I wanted to write something similar a while back but never got around to it.
I believe in a fixed monthly payment, as pay per click does benefit the advertiser rather than the publisher.
Another thing I believe to be unfair is referral links, where, say someone clicks on an ad on my website, gets referred to my advertisers site, and then buys something there, then I get a percentage of what is bought.
kalahari.net do this, and loads of other sites. The problem is, a person needs to click your referral link to ensure that you make the money. What often happens in these cases, is people click the ad, and don’t buy a product straight away.
But they do remember the advert, and later on when they are ready to buy a product, they will usually go directly to the website selling the product, and the publisher makes no money, even though they have increased exposure for a brand.
And once people have used a referral on your site once, they will normally go directly to your advertisers site in the future, instead of clicking through your site.
So it definitely works in an advertisers favour and not in the publishers favour.
Sean Lloyd,
One other important point you added, is the fact that after clicking on the advertiser’s advert once, the visitor goes directly (not through clicking the ad on the publisher’s site) to the advertiser’s site from the second visit onwards.
Which means the publisher will not be part of any future transactions, therefore the publisher will not be remunerated.
Thanks for sharing your views.
very intersting Mokokoma, very thought provoking.
web advertising needs a thorough review.
pay per exposure, but how much would advertisers pay then?
or would they have the finance to pay all the websites that they advertise to world wide?
suggestions?
Personally I think pay per click and referral will always be a part of internet advertising. However, if you really want to make loads of cash from internet advertising it’s probably best you create a company/brand website that advertisers want to pay to be on. College Humour comes to mind, with advertisers paying up to $60000 a month to feature on the website.
Scroll down on the following link and look for the College Humour write up, very interesting:
http://www.thecoolhunter.net/profiles/
Alternatively what people do nowadays is create blogs/websites that are funny and interesting and they advertise their own companies on their own website.
This is the best way of maximising profits as you are essentially advertising your businesses for free.
Yasser,
Advertisers should be charged for their exposure which is meant to lead to action (sales) not for the visitor’s action alone.
As a publisher I might not have led my visitor to click on an advertisers advert, reason being they don’t find the services / products advertised appealing but I exposed the advertiser’s brand – which is an investment to the advertiser – I think it’s only fair for the advertiser to also acknowledge that – financially.
The publisher is meant to charge what the ad space is worth not what the advertiser’s budget would afford.
How much to charge obviously is dependent on a lot of factors from the publisher’s side, the most determining one being the exposure measured in size readership.
Sean Lloyd,
I hear you, but what makes publishers ‘special’ is their readership – which is a market targeted by some potential advertiser out there.
While creating your own website to advertise your company on sounds like a money saving venture, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll attract your company’s targeted market or better audience than those of a certain publisher.
Thanks for the link to College humor.
Pay per click makes sense when ads are published on websites where the advertiser has no idea what kind of traffic the website has (as in the case of adsense). One of the sites I run has peculiarly low traffic despite a high alexa ranking and really decent page rank.
If advertisers were being paid per impression, then they would be paying money for nothing essentially since the alexa and PR metrics would lead them to believe that I have higher traffic.
Once a site can prove really high traffic, the site will naturally have advertisers clamouring to advertise on a fixed price basis, as they will know that it is worth their while eg the advertising on 2oceansvibe.com.