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Mark Cuban a proponent of revenue sharing?

Mark Cuban suggests that sites share ad revenue; a great idea on the surface, but facing a lot of challenges.

The example Mark gives is a pretty ideal one — get a big site, such as the New York Times, to pay the smaller sites that link to them when those links result in extra ad views or ad clicks, depending on the ad model at the large site.

I’m all for this, personally. I’d love to see a little change come my way if I happen to link to CNN.com. The problem comes in the challenges in keeping the system legitimate and free from scams, as well as in tracking what users are actually revenue generators.

If you pay for every click through to your site, then you have the current simple ad system as it is now. Now, if you only pay if the click through to your site becomes an ad click through, then we have a new system. As with cost per click systems, robots that just click through things to generate revenue will have to be tracked. The trail of clicks to track has become longer, and with every extra step, the harder it is to keep the system clean, from a technical standpoint.

Advertisers will also be curious about this sytem — how likely are these visitors to buy their products? They’ll want to know what kind of sites are benefitting from this revenue sharing and they’ll want to know whether the extra ad clickers are actually well-formed leads or casual browsers.

I’m always in favor of monetizing every last inch of the long tail, but I’m skeptical (as are many of the commenters on Mark’s site) of the effectiveness and plausibility of it.

But I’d love to be proven wrong.

Mon November 14th, 2005 10:57 pm

Filed under Advertising & Marketing, Web