Internal Debate: Senseless Ads

It's happening. The web is being ripped apart by goodness-knows-what galactic forces and piled onto an errant garbage dump floating off Io's southern pole. Don't believe me? Check out Computerworld's recent news article, and weep.

Replacing pay-per-click ads with cost-per-action ads may not seem like a big deal at first, but hang on a bit. Take a look at all the ads on this page: the banner up top; the tower down the left side; the box to the right; the sponsored links that engorge the page's footer; and the Flash ads that spring to life in the middle of the screen every so often. Don't have a pop-up blocker? I pity thee.

Like every other news corporation out there, Computerworld makes its revenue from ads. Be it the full-page spreads in the magazine's print edition or the myriad animated images online, your interest in those ads helps to net us the dough we need to get you the latest news and feature stories that bring you back to us. But there's a serious problem that's likely to arise with the onset of CPA advertisements: each ad may net less cash.

Let's say you saw an ad on this page you found intriguing. You click over to the site for a moment, get a quick idea of what it's all about, and say to yourself, “Good to know. I'll file that away.” You click back to CW. We get paid, you know of the company's service and may (or may not) use it in the future. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how advertisements are supposed to work: they get the message out. Whether or not you take advantage is irrelevant; the point is that you noticed it in the first place.

Under Google's new version of AdSense, however, you'd have to go one step further -- make a phone call, fill out a form, complete an online sale, etc. -- in order for us to get paid. I don't know about you, but I'm not very likely to fill out some random site survey to get more info -- at least, not right away. I'm busy reading the page where I first saw the ad. You don't see people stopping on the sides of highways next to billboards so that they can make phone calls right there, do you? Of course not. That's just silly.

So what happens when ads go CPA? Sure, we'll probably get paid more per action than we'd get per click, but there would likely be a net loss, and to compensate we'd have to fill pages out with more ads. That doesn't sound like such a grand plan to me.

Click fraud is an issue, yes, but surely it can be tracked by logging IP numbers and only paying for clicks from unique addresses. I can't help but wonder why ad companies are resorting to methods more likely to annoy potential customers than help them; it seems to me that we need to keep browsing the internet as pleasant an experience as possible. Otherwise we're just floating in some garbage heap off the southern pole of Io.