I have recently been introduced to the world of digital advertising in my COMM 464 class. As I start to learn more about this field, I realize that the most optimum way to get the maximum benefit out of this platform is to take a Search Engine Marketing approach (SEM). SEM essentially means we should use both Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Advertising to enable our business’ website appear higher on the search engine result list and thus, more likely to be noticed by online users. Paid search advertising mainly uses the Pay per Click (PPC) or Cost per Click (CPC) model as a revenue model, which means that advertisers only need to pay when users click on their paid advertisement. However, a recent article I found suggests that we may have a new revenue model to consider, Cost per Hour.

This was started by the Financial Times who recently declared that they will start using this revenue model for their website’s online advertisement space. Apparently The Financial Times website visitors’ habit of reading their articles for long period of time means that they are exposed to less amount of online advertisement compared to users of other websites, which gives them a disadvantage in following the traditional CPC model as this translates to less advertisement clicks. To accommodate the unique nature of its visitors, The Financial Times proposed the CPH model so that advertisements on their website can be evaluated more fairly based on how long users are exposed to the ads on each webpage they stay on. Theoretically, I believe this would be a great fit to The Financial Times and other websites where users are less  likely to go to many webpages but more likely to stay longer on the webpages they visit, since customers are also more likely to remember ads when they are exposed to ads for long period of time. However, in practice, I think this model would not be able to replace the CPC model yet, as this model still brings a more certain measurement on ROI by having interested users take one step to confirm their interest in the ads (by clicking them). So, I would recommend news websites and other website with similar user habit to follow both CPC and CPH revenue model to maximize their advertisement space potential.

Source: http://adage.com/article/media/digital-advertising-ready-ditch-click/295143/