Online advertising

Wednesday, May 14th, 2008

It’s always flattering when a company asks if they can advertise on your website. However a recent spate of these requests got me thinking. The requests often come from online gaming sites and take to form of ‘ we will pay you £50 CPA if you will display our advert’.

At first this looks like easy money for the webmaster. But have a think about this. When agreeing to pay on CPA ( cost per acquisition ) the advertiser is effectively getting free promotion of their brand on as many sites as they can convince to run it. A visitor will see this advert many times and if they decided to click on it AND sign up, then that, and only that,  gets the CPA money.

So in effect you as a webmaster are giving away page views to these companies. They get free, no-risk advertising, as they only have to pay if someone signs up for their service and pays them. Nice money for them, but for you and your website? I think not.

We have stoped accepting CPA requests, we have built up the traffic with lots of hard work and see no reason for others to piggyback on this without contributing to the costs.

I’m sure there are those in ‘Ad Land’ who can argue the case of CPA and I am happy to be convinced otherwise.