From the 60-Second Window “I Told You So!” Department: #115 The Million Click Model In August of 1995, I published 60-Second Window #64, called “One is a lonely number.” In that issue I talked about where the web would go some day. At that time everyone was so excited about merely getting on the web, scarce few could really read the writing on the wall. Understanding the awesome ramifications of this new communications media, and knowing the blood thirsty minds of the corporate world you could easily predict what was going to happen. Or, rather -- happened. __ Without even realizing it, the majority of web users have been herded into the retentive clutches of the big marketers, the portal sites and big business search engines so they can sell ads for page views or clicks. Everybody has gone ecommerce happy. Even the once esteemed Yahoo has become little more than a money-grubbing mall site, stripped of usefulness. “I want a piece of the action” is the cry of Y2K. __Greed and the unquenchable thirst for more surfers to buy more stuff has forged a new model for the ad industry without ever considering the evil down side. Sure, big time advertising clients love the Million-Click model. Now they only have to pay for the number of “hits” or “views” their ad receives. Banner Exchange hawkers trade page views for page views. How do you know? The typical banner exchange program gives you banner exposure for a click (or two) on one of their banners. But suppose no one clicks? __Suppose ZDNet has 50 paid links on every page. They charge a flat click-through rate of maybe a 2-cents per click. They love those millions of clicks generating those hundreds of thousands of dollars -- you would too. But what if no one clicked? What would they want to do? __What if you were one of those advertisers, paying Yahoo, or About.com, or ZDNet based on clicks, or views? When you pay for 10,000 views, what did you actually pay for? Do you know? What do you think you got? What if ZDNet got to the point where they really liked getting $100,000 per day in click-through revenue... but they realized that the numbers had declined and the page was only generating $5,000 today. What would they do next? __The advertising community as well as the banner exchange arena have painted themselves into a corner of basing their economy on what web surfers do -- actual performance. They’ve been very smug because they could SHOW ad buyers how many views they got, lulling them into the walking sleep of confirmed readers. You don’t want to pay for what you don’t get, right? __Now, shift gears for a moment: suppose you’re a mega-dollar portal site that generates a million views a day, and charges accordingly. What if at some point you realized you’re not actually generating a million revenue producing hits a day, but you’ve really become attached to your way of living. What would you do? Do you suppose the multi-million dollar sites don’t have the where-with-all to hire the top programmers to build robots to click their page ads? Do you think they wouldn’t do it? Do you suppose the Banner Exchange people don’t have the know-how to program intelligent agents that live on the web wandering from banner to banner clicking here and there? The search robots do it. Why not us? __What if you could program a spyder that could click your advertisers ad in your website a million times a month, changing its origin with each click, and making a registrable session on the advertisers site -- perhaps even wandering to another page to click a banner. Sounds good doesn’t it? “Hello, Mr. Advertiser Client, you had a million clicks this month... that will be Ten-Thousand Dollars, please.” Who do the big sites answer to? Did you ever wonder that? __How about these associates programs. How many books did you sell today? How many surfers did you send to that ecommerce site that you’ll never be paid for? Did you get all the banner exposures the exchange owes you? __Do you have any real proof that your ad was seen 10,000 times today? __If an intelligent agent generated a million clicks on the Banner Exchange banner in your web site, they would have to give your banner 500,000 views on other web sites, wouldn’t they? Well? Wouldn’t they? You’d like to have one of these robots, wouldn’t you? Certainly something to think about, isn’t it? Thanks for reading. Until next time... Good day! Fred "There are only two forces that unite men - fear and interest." Napoleon I