Internet advertising is in flux and flow. Pay per view or PPV networks are rushing into favor and pay per click is tottering on the brink of extinction as costs per click are reaching absurd levels such as $4 to $30 per unique visitor.
Google made a decision recently. Late in 2009 it slapped affiliate marketers so hard that about 100,000 were banned from AdWords, indefinitely. The thinking at Google is always about relevance and quality. The world’s largest search engine wants to provide a quality experience for its millions of searchers and rightly so. However, many affiliate marketers were on the point of leaving or giving up anyway. Costs had risen through the relentless competition and quality score slaps were driving the cost per click up even faster.
Enter pay per view advertising at a mere one cent per visitor. This PPV concept has actually been around for about a decade, but suddenly its merits are being broadcast loudly around The Internet by some rather active marketers. These are the people selling the training course. With pay per view, networks show ads across tens of thousands of participating web sites in the form of a pop up window. These are not obtrusive or interruption marketing because they are only shown to approving members who may have downloaded a small software app that controls the ads and their relevance for the viewer.
Marketers are currently rushing into PPV networks because they’ve been sold the idea of getting one cent visitors. There are pitfalls for new players, of course. The major problem is one of targeting your offers. The writer has been experimenting and has found that the networks’ categories are too broad and cannot be considered as a tightly relevant form of ad targeting. Therefore, product offers will need to be really popular and generic items more related to cell phones and entertainment, gaming and dating, etc.
With every innovation online, it’s the first mover who makes the shockingly big money. Pay per view affiliate advertising is definitely making some prime movers quite wealthy at the moment, but how long will this bounty last? When the masses finally flood in, they tend to ruin every form of online advertising, just as they have done with pay per click AdWords style Internet advertising.
Summary
PPV is absolutely hot today and in pure marketing cost terms it is trumping pay per click at the three major search engines. Marketers will need to be quick to innovate and to take advantage or they will see the opportunity dissolve before their eyes within twelve months. That’s a prediction worth thinking about.
