Is it Time for a New Search Advertising Model? - What Will Replace Pay-Per-Click?
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Click fraud, domain tasting, spyware, adware, made-for-AdSense web sites – all of this is powered by how easy it is for publishers to make money off of the current pay-per-click search engine advertising model. There’s nothing wrong with making money, of course, but in this case it is at the cost of someone else. Advertisers and site owners who pay for PPC ads are not getting what they paid for.
I admit that I am not a big fan of advertising (though it does pay the bills for us). But no one who has entered into a business deal in good faith deserves to be cheated. The search engines do not intentionally cheat their advertisers, but it seems clear that they’re having some difficulty policing the members of their content networks. When a system is this open to abuse, one has to ask whether it’s time for a change.
You’ll find several articles on SEO Chat that mention pay-per-action. It’s an advertising model that is being promoted by Bill Gross, the same person who came up with the original pay-per-click idea. With pay-per-action, the advertiser doesn’t pay every time someone clicks on his ad; rather, he pays when someone completes a specific prescribed action after clicking on his ad (buys a product, subscribes to a newsletter, explores a page on a web site – there are plenty of possibilities). While we mentioned it as early as August of 2005, pay-per-action hasn’t picked up a lot of traction yet, possibly because it isn’t as profitable for publishers as pay-per-click.
We might still see pay-per-action take root. Or someone might come up with a hybrid between pay-per-click and pay-per-action, where the advertiser pays a minimal amount of money for the initial click through and more if/when the web surfer takes the desired action. Someone might even come up with an entirely new and different search engine advertising model. But however you look at it, the problems with the pay-per-click advertising model aren’t going away any time soon.
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