gregbo - 10:56 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

for sure, every side prefers secure earnings, low risk and pushing off labour to the others - but that is hardly possible to achieve for everyone. what we need is market balance. in this context, i want you to understand that cpc is the base of googles' success story.

The jury is still out on whether all the money that was made via CPC was legitimately made.

no other accounting method would have been capable of attracting both parties in crowds.

This has yet to be proven. CPC is cheap, easy, and fraud-ridden. I imagine its current success is primarily a property of the first two. Whether the latter will have an effect, we will find out eventually.

of course it took a big company to push this through on a market that was dominated by lousy affiliate programs and poor business prospects for content publishers. one cannot disqualify cpm and cpa, but they are and will rather be admixed by-products, whereas cpc likely stays the core product providing the highest total utility.

Ultimately the marketplace will decide. But I don't believe that the risks of CPC are fully understood. When they are fully understood, ie. when any advertiser or publisher (or for that matter, investor) can pick up an easily understood document that details the actual risks of CPC fraud vs. the others, then we will be able to say which business model will prevail.