You might have heard of the PayPerPlay system which allows you to monetize 100% of your traffic by paying you to play a 5 second ad to every unique visitor you get (or more, if you so desire). You put the code into your page and every time someone comes to it and the audio ad plays, you get paid. While is is of course very attractive to every site owner there is always one thing that we should continuously be concerned about - your visitors and how do the various kinds of advertisements you feed them with affect them and their good will towards your site. From my own experience, there are many visitors who would say a definitive no to flash and various other "rich media" advertisements and often block them from view. Many also don't easily accept seeing too many image ads or even too many link ads. And when your sites audience, community and user base in general gets annoyed by the advertising you put on your site, it not only hurts your own reputation, but the reputation of your site as well. You just have to show respect for them if you want them to respect you, which is all the more true the more competing sites there are. Why should the stick to your site if you keep banging on them with various ads? So we have here 5 second audio ads. The advantage is that it requires pretty much nothing explicit from visitors. It doesn't pop into their view to disrupt their reading and its length is sufficiently small not to be too intrusive. However the disadvantage is clear: It is audio! They expect to come to the site and just see text and images, like on most sites - and then all of a sudden something starts playing out of nowhere. I can imagine quite a few people being outraged by this. So where do we draw the line? And should we tolerate 5 second audio ads? Where do you draw the line? Perhaps.. we could have a way to warn people that a given site has an audio ad embedded and also appeal to them by saying that they pay for the site. This would perhaps help alleviate some of the disadvantageous characteristics of audio ads. Maybe we should come up with a standard graphical icon that can be placed on every site which features an audio ad that would tell visitors that they can expect it when they visit. The icon would link to a further explanation of the audio ad and why is it there. Thoughts?
The thought of visiting pages and having to listen to adds seems intrusive and I wouldn't want to be a surfer confronted with them on a regular basis. For media such as blogs it is going to greatly annoy repeat visitors if they habitually have their sound on. It might suit sites than get most of their traffic from search engines without many repeate visitors though.
I wonder how many people have their speakers turn on or their sound volume on mute when they browse the web. I know I always turn the sound off on my computer unless I want to hear something.
Pay Per Play is the new popup I will personally never return to a website that has annoying audio ads that turn on without me pressing a start button, or have no MUTE button.
Good points. I've actually signed up to this program mostly to just give it a chance, but also because I think that, while it might not be good for most sites it may be fairly acceptable for site on which people do expect to hear something like video and music streaming sites. And I plan on launching a video related project so this may be a nice fit. However, I now pretty much doubt I'll be putting this on silent content sites (which two of my main sites are). Now that you brought the start or mute button up I think what would be a really cool thing is if instead of just playing the ad without asking the PayPerPlay service would offer a nice banner with a play button that could be put in some corner or anywhere the webmaster wishes on which people would be able to click if they're curious. Yes it would essentially end up being PayPerClick-to-play, but might still be a nice compromise. And compared to adsense, it may be slightly more inviting and less ignored than adsense ads. BUT, I wouldn't have this sort of thing be in flash. I believe javascript would do. I wish something like widgetbucks was in javascript too. Among the biggest reasons I didn't put that thing on my site is that it is flash - and flash is banned on my sites with the rare exception of having a really relevant embedded video on them from metacafe, youtube etc.
I think its a future of web advertising right now it needs allot of development and improvement. videos and other rich media can be hard to load on ppl with slow internet.