Money talks

IDEA No 47

PAY PER CLICK

In February 1998, Jeffrey Brewer changed the advertising industry forever. He introduced the world to pay per click.

Pay per click (PPC) is a model in which advertisers pay a website owner only when their ad is clicked on. It eliminates the uncertainty of pay-per-impression (PPM) models, where the advertiser pays each time the ad is displayed, regardless of whether the viewer takes any action.

Although the model is now synonymous with AdWords, Google was slow to adopt PPC. AltaVista, Excite and Yahoo! got there first, adopting Brewer’s goto.com platform in the late ’90s.

Google has always displayed sponsored links next to natural search results, but it originally operated a pay-per-impression model. As with ...

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