Rethinking pay-per-click as big prices hit advertisers
Article: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/335149
In Google’s current Adwords system, an advertiser will select a set of keywords for his ad, and will only pay when the ad gets clicked. Paul Wallis, however, argues that this approach may be unpredictable, and unfair to small businesses as well as to the web pages selling ad space and that, instead, Google should rely more on the target of ads showing up as organic search results.
Wallis argues that, for many small businesses, it is impossible to pay for sufficient advertising to gain a hold in the market. In addition, when one makes an offer for a set of keywords and an amount one is willing to pay per click, they really don’t know what the outcome will be in terms of benefit for the company or in terms of what percentage of click throughs will result in a sale. Web pages selling ad space also do not know what will be displayed in this space – if it will be offensive or irritating to their site users, and thus, may be punished unjustly for allowing ads to be placed on their site.
In effect, Wallis argues that, when people are clicking through the internet, they are looking for content, not ads, therefore diluting the content space via the addition of inorganic ads will not necessarily be a benefit to either the advertiser or the internet user. Wallis uses the New York Times as an example, which sells ads at a low fixed price. Due to the content in the New York Times, these ad spaces are seen as much more valuable than pay per click ads.
Thus, Wallis argues that making ads more “organic” (ie not occurring higher on result list because of payment) will improve both SEO (search engine optimization – the process of improving the visibility of a website/page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results) and user/advertiser experience.
How this relates to class:
While Wallis did not go into detail about how exactly his “organic” advertising scheme would work in terms of ad space, I can see the merit of his some of his points. Effectively, in choosing to include ads on a page, we are diluting the content of that page. By “diluting” I mean to say that we are removing the user’s attention from the page’s true content, to that of the ads. If these ads are not highly relevant, and the user avoids following them, then they will simply distract the user from the rest of the content of the page, which may itself contain links to more “organic” ads that are necessarily highly relevant, due to the fact that they were effectively “hand-selected” by the web site.
So now consider the process of assigning hub/authority scores to a set of nodes, where the nodes contain “organic” ads.
If a hub contains irrelevant ads, then we are effectively are lowering that hub’s hub score via distracting the user. This will result in decreased authority scores for pages containing organic ads. Thus, organic ads may be harmed by the presence of in-organic ads. And the gain for the advertiser of these in organic ads may not be paying enough to make up for the organic advertiser’s losses (ie this is probably not a social optimum), especially if the user is not clicking on the in-organic ads, and, thus, they are merely distracting.
-Spiff