TechnoCloud

The likes of Commission Junction and TradeDoubler should be stirring their tea nervously, with news that Google is moving into the world of affiliate marketing. The AdSense blog reveals that they are now ‘accepting applications for new referrals beta’, leading to a flood of chatter in the blogosphere .

Cost-per-click advertising has been one of the great success stories of online advertising and has fueled the Google Advertising juggernaut. It’s strikes a satisfactory balance between the advertiser’s desire to pay for actions only and the publisher’s desire to get paid for branding. It has its critics with regards to ongoing problems with click fraud, but it continues to thrive because it works.

While the move into cost-per-action won’t threaten the cost-per-click cash cow anytime soon, it’s an interesting play to control yet more of the world’s online ad inventory.

It does make it harder to conduct click fraud (although the fraudsters will try), but will the returns be big enough for publishers to gain sufficient take-up? The beta is US only at present, so I will have to read about other’s findings to see if the numbers look likely to add up. I’m not so sure they will.

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MTV parent Viacom is allowing web users to embed videos from a number of MTV sites, including Pimp My Ride, into their web spaces. This comes at a time when Viacom requested the removal of 100k+ clips from YouTube.

While this move shows Viacom’s desire to control the source of their content on the web, they are prepared to let users consume it at least partly on their own terms, whether embedded on a blog or in their social networking space. With the content contained in their player, they can potentially place advertising around the player or within the content to monetise their content in this space.

Check out our example below to see it in action.

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Interesting post from Micropersuasion adding to the growing questioning of page views as a meaningful metric.

Given the growth in technologies, such as Ajax and even humble old Flash, which allow users to interact with page content without refreshing the page, the page view was already on questionnable ground - not that the industry could agree on how best to measure them in the first place…

Add to this the network effects of influencers that take an idea or brand and discuss it outside of the source site on their blog or social space and it challenges the traditional ad standard of ‘reach’ with an alternative measure ‘depth’ - although you should still look to measure the wider reach of a campaign from the wider network effects of ‘depth’.

I can see how the ‘depth’ argument works well for brands using online advertising and PR as ways to raise awareness, stimulate conversations and drive sales of their products.

It’s less clear for content publishers trying to monetise their content through advertising - how to charge and for what? Are unique users the metric, or are channel or site sponsorships the right model or are other models better suited to this space? Time will tell. It’s debatable how important page views were anyway in the wider world of stats and cost-per-click and cost-per-action advertising.

For content publishers non-intrusive ad-supported widgets may be a tool to monetise some of the depth and for wider network effects to be the PR that drives users back to the source content and widgets. 2007 is going to be an interesting year.

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