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Advertising models in an evolving web

By March 30, 20072 Comments3 min read

For those of you who read this site, you might have noticed I’m a big pontificator on ads and models of ads. If it was up to me, some company would pay me $200k a year + stock to come up with cool new ideas for monetizing sites. If you have that job, or would like to create it for me, email me ;-). Anyway, as pageviews are dying, and CPC is rife with click-fraud (its inevitable, don’t ignore that), we as a money loving community need to keep ahead of the curve. So in that spirit, I am going to propose several new ad models right here for your own enjoyment.

Hybrid CPM/C – aka HyC (that sounds catchy)
Hybrid CPM/CPC henceforth to be referred to as HyC is a model based on CPM based ads that give extra bonus to the publisher for action being taken. So lets assume that pageviews are getting cheaper (assume under $10CPM), but companies are still looking to reduce their risk, hence a hybrid CPM model. Take a now cheaper CPM model (less basic risk to the advertiser) and pair it with a direct action compensation model (CPC) and the publisher’s lower potential revenue are now potentially better. The reasoning behind this poorly eloquated idea is the digg effect. Digg visitors are notorious for not clicking ads, but draining your bandwidth. So this model would compensate both camps, the massive influx of visitors from the social sites, as well as the potentially interested customers who click through. So you have a hybrid branding/sales model.

Now you might be thinking, well HTF (how the ….) do we develop this model properly? Well it takes some interesting math skills to balance the equation necessary for this model to work well. Why do I ignore CPA in this model? Well unless you have access to the entire sales chain, its shit. So HyC= CPM+CPC = happy publisher. So I promised you multiple ad models, well…

HyCT – Hybrid CPM/CPT
You know I’m not sure CPT is a commonly used term yet (maybe there is another I’m missing), but for me it means cost per time (tiempo?). What does the HyCT model mean? Well its really an answer to the death of pageviews. With ajax proliferation, pageviews are going down, but time spent on sites is in fact not. I would take a wild guess and say people watch netvibes for hours per day, or Youtube…. So what’s the solution? I hinted at it before (can’t find the link). But the new model is one that employs some old models and new ones. The traditional ad on tv is fixed at timeXviews, it seems to have worked well over time, and it would be easy to implement in the modern era. Using that same ajax/javascript that is reducing pageviews, ads can theoretically be rotated periodically. Why not sell an ad based on time of exposure. If you’re typically getting visitors on your page for 3.5 seconds per visit, why not charge ads in a 3.5 second increment per pageview? i.e. someone reads the page for 7 seconds they should generate 2x the revenue….

So how would you change advertising? And do you have any other quirky acronyms or labels for your ads?

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