I used to use the Alladvantage viewbar on my computer. Prolly still should, since I made a few bucks doing it. I got two checks, each for slightly more than 20 dollars. My question is, where is this money coming from? AA pays 50 cents per hour to show me ads. Webmasters only make, what, a few cents per click? Even if we’re being very generous, say 10 cents per click, I find it hard to believe that the average AA user clicks on ads 5 times per hour. I know that I, personally, probably clicked on 2 ads for the whole 80 hours I got paid for.
If the advertisers are paying per impression, I find it hard to believe they are getting their money’s worth. After all, $40 found its way out of their pockets and into mine, with some more making a stop at AllAdvantage’s pocket, presuming AA makes money per impression. I sure didn’t buy anything from any of these advertisers, and I presume a whole lot of others didn’t either. Do the rest of the AA users buy enough stuff to make up for it?
I just don’t get it. Who is responsible for giving me money for doing nothing?
IIRC, AllAdvantage and a lot of the other big web-advertising outfits don’t work on the basis of “advertiser X pays Y cents every time someone clicks a link to their site.” Rather, the advertisers pay a certain amount of money per thousand ‘impressions’, or times that their adbar gets loaded onto someone’s computer, regardless of whether that person clicks or not.
It doesn’t matter so much to AllAdvantage that you’re not clicking on the viewbar; they’re most likely still getting paid anyway just for showing you the ads. (Of course, in the long term, they DO care, because if no one clicks the links, then nobody’s going to advertise with them.)
Which is what I believe may be, in fact, happening to them. I used to surf with an AllAdvantage viewbar way back when they were first getting started, but I got fed up and quit as the rates, hours, and referral pay gradually seemed to get crappier and crappier. Either AllAdvantage is just greedy and trying to take a bigger piece of the pie, or those ad dollars ain’t coming in like they used to.
There’s a principle that I missed when I first looked at it, and that’s well-hidden.
Let’s put it this way: You don’t get any money until you’ve racked up $20 in time, at which point you get a check. Many people never get a check because, like me, they used it for about two hours before considering it too annoying. Many others take a long time to get to $20. All the while, what money AllAdvantage is getting from advertisers is earning interest–I suspect in a rather high-interest account, because they’ve got to have a nice stash in case a lot of payouts suddenly come due.
The problem is that rates for advertising are maybe a fifth of what they were this time last year, and probably will continue dropping. I suspect AllAdvantage will be bankrupt within two years.
Also… since they have such a large number of impressions, they almost certainly are getting paid CPI–cost per impression–rather than CPC (cost per click, the format you describe). So, they’re making money from advertising whether you click or not, just as NBC makes money from advertising whether or not you buy the products advertised.
