The meaning of the ads on a site

I was wondering what the common internet users think about the AdSense and other types of ads on websites. Me being a web developer (too), I know their meaning: most likely they keep the website rolling. Now let’s see some stuff about this subject.

First, let’s point out some basic things in Internet Advertising. Who is the publisher and who is the advertiser? The publisher is me. I publish ads on the top and in the navigation sidebar of my website. Both ad blocks are paying only if a user interacts with them, so if you click (DON’T DO IT NOW) one of those ads I get some money. But don’t think my pocket will be full in no time! No. These ads usually pays very small amount. My experience is that the advertisers set a very low price for one very obvious reason: they want to pay as little as possible and earn as much visitor as possible. So the advertisers are who created those ads. If you click on an ad, you will be taken to the advertiser’s website and the publisher receives the commission for the referral.

Now let’s see the advertisement types. There are three I will mention now: CPM, CPA and CPC. Don’t be scared, I explain each below.

If the ads are CPM based ads, they keep the site rolling OK. The user doesn’t have to interact with the advertisement to generate some tiny revenue for the website when talking about CPM ads, so these are the most convenient ones if a website has many thousands of visitors. CPM ads are usually so called ‘branding’ ads and they are used to, well, to brand. Again usually, these are image ads not text ads. For example, the below ad SHOULD be a CPM ad coming from Google AdSense. Since the publishers have no great control over whom ads are displayed, theoretically on each page load this should show a new ad and Google decides what type of ad and which advertiser’s. If there is no CPM ad available for the context of this post, it will show a CPC ad. If no CPC ad is available, it will show a … nothing.

There are two other type of ads I mentioned above: CPC and CPA. Well, there are more, but for example I consider pop-unders and pop-ups an extremely annoying and idiotic thing, not an advertisement. So, the CPC ads are Cost per Click ads. This means that the advertiser who created that ad pays for the publisher only if a user actually clicks that small ad. And only then. An example for the CPC ad is shown below. These are usually text based ads. The greatest CPM and CPC advertisement networks are Google AdSense and Adbrite. I feel that Adbrite pays a bit better than AdSense but it pays only with checks which I don’t really like. AdSense offers Western Union electronic transfer to pay the publishers (in a few countries) which is extremely convenient for me. Also, AdBrite’s engine shows more CPM ad, which on a high traffic website is an extremely good thing.

On the other hand, CPA or Cost per Action/Acquisition pays even harsher case: the user who clicked the ad has to do something on the advertisers website. The advertisement from the very top of this page, actually all of the pages on this website, are CPA ads. The greatest CPA ad networks are DoubleClick and CommissionJunction.

So, as a last word. I know that the common users already formed a so called “ad blindness” which typically means that they simply don’t see the ads, but sometimes, especially if you like the website, you should try to forget about that blindness

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