Pay Per View Marketing
PPV Marketing
What is PPV Marketing?
Pay Per View (PPV) marketing, also known as Cost Per View (CPV), is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay every time their landing page is viewed. PPV marketing typically involves dedicated networks (more on that later) who show the ads to people who have downloaded and installed a special piece of software known as adware. Adware, per se, is not spyware or a sort of worm/virus that invade on people’s privacy, although there are people/organizations who create spyware and make them appear and seem to behave like adware.
Simply put, an adware is basically an ad-supported software—it could be a game, an instant messaging software, a downloader, a media player, or a browser toolbar. It could be anything. Some examples of well known adware programs (or programs distributed with adware) are the AOL instant Messenger, the Ask.com toolbar, Daemon Tools, DivX, Kazaa, and Yahoo Messenger.
Notice the ad at the lower left corner of the screenshot of Kazaa above. That ad, when clicked on, will invoke a Web browser window which will automatically go to and display the advertiser’s website. This is just one example of how an adware works.
Another popular behavior of adware that is typical of search toolbars is that when a user performs a search, an additional window (pop-up) appears and displays the advertisers landing page.
Yet another very popular behavior of adware is that it installs a plugin on the user’s Web browser which executes a pop-up window each time the user tries to go to a website. To illustrate…
Let’s say you’re the user and you’ve got the adware installed on your computer. You fire up your browser and type in http://www.google.com. The moment you press enter or click on the “Go” button, in addition to the main browser window displaying Google’s homepage, a pop-up window appears showing the landing page of an advertiser.
What’s good about PPV from the marketers’ standpoint is that it is not subject to Google’s strict advertising rules. As such, landing pages/sites involved in PPV campaigns are not subject to Google’s ranking factors and the dreaded “Google slap”. Just in case you didn’t know, “Google Slap” is a term used by AdWords advertisers to refer to the punitive action taken by Google against advertisers who submit poor quality landing pages.
Additionally, keyword and keyword phrase bid prices in PPV campaigns are cheaper than in AdWords campaigns.
What’s not so nice about PPV ads is that, since they are displayed via pop-up windows, they can get quite annoying.
How can marketers promote with PPV campaigns?
PPV marketing works very much the same way as CPC marketing. Just like in doing CPC campaigns, marketers need to sign up with an adware network to be able to do PPV campaigns. And, just like in CPC campaigns, marketers go to these dedicated networks and bid on keywords. What’s different is that, adware networks allow marketers to bid on URLs, too, so that when someone visits the website that a marketer has bid on, that marketer’s ad will pop up on the user’s screen.
To illustrate, here’s how it works…
Let’s say you are running a dating site and you have an offer. You go to the adware network and bid on keywords that have something to do with. In addition, you also bid on the URLs of popular dating/romance sites, let’s say okcupid.com, eharmony.com, lavalife.com, and plentyoffish.com.
Going back to our previous example, when someone (who has the adware installed) tries to go to any of those sites (okcupid.com, eharmony.com, lavalife.com, and plentyoffish.com), a pop-up window will automatically appear on that user’s monitor and display your landing page. Same thing happens if the user does a search on any of the keywords you’ve bid on.
That’s basically what PPV marketing is.
How much money to get started?
The cost per view ranges from as little as a cent ($0.01) to as high as $0.14, which is really cheap. However, some of the adware networks requires you to pay a deposit upon signing up with them. TrafficVance.com, for instance, requires you to pay a $1,000 deposit to get started.
