Is There a Future for Internet Audio Ads

Twenty or thirty years ago, an advertiser could run an ad on a prime time TV show and expect to get an audience in the high millions. But nowadays it is more likely to be in the very low millions or even thousands. When ads come on the TV, people have a tendency to switch up and down channels. They have so much choice. So it becomes increasingly expensive for advertisers to get their message out to the population. They are turning to the Internet to look for more economic ways to advertise where they are finding a much more receptive audience.

We have seen a rapid and huge growth in Pay Per Click advertising, and now we are starting to hear about Pay Per Play (PPP) advertising where visitors will hear a 5 second audio ad when they visit a web page. The advertising partners will pay for each audio ad played so all the visitor has to do is visit the page, and provided they have their speakers switched on, they will hear the ad.

The website publisher will then receive payment for that visitor. So you can imagine if you have a website that already gets traffic of 1000 visitors a day and the PPP rate is .01 cent, then you make $10 a day from that website for no effort at all. No requirement for the visitor to click any ads, just to visit your site. So is you're a publisher who gets many thousand visitors a day, you could earn considerable income from this form of advertising.

I discuss this concept in more detail on my website here, but I wonder if it could be open to abuse. For example, how will advertisers determine traffic source and quality? What about traffic exchange sites? I think the principle of Pay Per Play is sound, but suspect it could be wide open to abuse. It is very early days for this new type of advertising medium and I think that because of the risks the payments to publishers will be smaller than PPC.

But, even at a penny a go, that could still mount up to hundreds of dollars a day for some web site owners. So let's watch this space and see how PPP things develop.