gregbo - 5:29 am on Feb 6, 2006 (gmt 0)

before adsense, online business was a one-sided advertiser market. it was about affiliate programs sucking out publishers with their pay per lead/sale method to squeeze out the last cent for their clients (=advertisers). for 90% of adsense publishers, there was simply no way to monetize a website to live on.

IMO, there has been too much attention paid to the ability to "monetize" a website, and not enough on the ability to prevent advertisers from being charged too much.

google et al revolutionize the market with their contextual cpc/cpm model. with them as middlemen, we have a win-win-win situation, for the first time giving the publisher negotiation power to DECLINE affiliate business proposals which don't generate adequate revenue for him.

It is not such a win-win-win situation from the advertiser's standpoint, particularly those who are victims of click fraud.

so now you are thinking because of fraudulent actions (which are inevitable for every accounting method) we're going back to the old pay per sale model?

It is far easier to commit click fraud than any other type of commercial fraud. CPC is an inherently poor business model. Pay per sale is better from an anti-fraud standpoint, but worse from the standpoint that all sales are not the (immediate) result of a search or visit to a publisher's site.

why do you think a publisher should accept once again branding and promotion FOR FREE without being compensated?

In general I think advertisers should pay fixed fees. How the fee is determined may be the result of bidding or some (statistical) assessment of the value of a human eyeing the ad. But publishers will at least be able to be compensated for the use of their sites, while considerably minimizing their advertisers' exposure to click fraud.