CPA’s are Injurious to Publishers Health

Posted by on Feb 4, 2009 in Advertising

CPAs – these are the nightmares for web publishers, they hardly pay a penny for their efforts! If they do pay then it is like winning a lottery which happens very rarely right? Well for starters, what’s meant by CPA? This is an Ad model which displays advertisements that pay publishers when a visitor clicks them and makes any set action desired by the advertiser like filling a form, buying something on the landing advertiser site etc. The poor publisher doesn’t get a single dollar even if he gets 100 clicks or 10,0000 clicks or infinite number of clicks to these CPA banners unless the clicks convert into sales! So it all depends on the luck of the publisher to earn money this way from the commission based ads.

Unfortunately with the global recession on, most of the ad networks that I have known have gone into this model! It’s quite sick for the publishers who spend hours together each day to come up with visitor-attracting content but his/her efforts get compensated very little if this trend of CPA ads continue. The advertisers will be happy with this so-called ‘Pay per performance’ ads! They get those thousands of free impressions on websites and need not spend much! Sometimes the publishers wonder if the Ad networks dealing in CPAs make any money or not, probably they sell them as CPMs (cost per impressions) or CPC (cost per click) to advertisers and provide them as CPAs for publishers….

Over the years, the experienced publishers have kept the CPA or CPL (cost per lead) ads in the last priority and at the most give a spot on their site for the CPA just to try their luck. But these days there is hardly any scope for CPC ads in the market which has forced Publishers to be reluctantly content with the junk CPA ads! Let’s hope that things will get alright soon and the Publishers start getting their deserving dues again! Until that time, the Publishers will be getting these kind of annoying messages – ‘We are pleased to announce the launch of this and that campaign which is offering this much commission, start promoting right away’ and having put that stuff up, you get a mail a couple of days later ‘Kindly pull off the banners of this immediately as this campaign has been paused, all the leads generated will not be credited in your account’.

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