We're solicited, on average, by about two or three different ad networks of varying types on a weekly basis here at Mashable. Some of them are great ideas, and some of them are downright stinkers. I'm not in the business side of things here at the blog, so I'm generally not privvy to where those conversations lead, so I can't speak to exactly who does what in terms of sponsorship for this site. I do get to see most of the offers on the way in through the editorial mailbox, though, and one that's slid past us a few times is an outfit called Pay Per Play.
Subject: Get paid for every visitor to your site
Body: This is a brand new program called Pay Per Play. It's a bit like Google Adsense except that it's a 5 second audio ad. Like Adsense, it's totally free ... just a small piece of code and you get paid for every visitor. No one has to click on anything. There is a time limit and also a limit to the number of people who will get to promote it. If it takes off, as I expect it to, someone is going to do well as a result.
Due to the stigma associated with autoplaying audio ads, I've been assured that we won't be taking advantage of that program here at Mashable. I have to wonder, based on my own experience, whether or not that stigmas is deserved or not. Conventional wisdom says that one of the biggest screw-ups a webmaster can make is to throw an advertising program on their site that will autoplay an audio clip. Surfers will complain louder and quicker about autoplaying audio ads than if you were to change the algorithm on Digg.
Back when Art and I were doing the RizWords podcast, it typically ran between forty five minutes to a little over an hour each daily episode. We found that the growth of the podcast was a bit slow in the beginning, in terms of both downloads and subscribers. We chatted over it and came to the conclusion that we should give autoplay a shot. Within weeks, our downloads shot predictably up, and our subscribes shot through the roof (and an unintended consequence occurred - a large portion of the long term podcast subscribers ended up being from China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates).
How did it affect our site viewership, though? Well, we monitored everything pretty closely before and after the switchover, and the bounce rate has only shifted unfavorably by 2%. Interestingly enough, the average length of visit went up substantially (by around six minutes or so). So what was my tradeoff for all the extra listens? Weeding out a few finicky visitors, and Tom Merritt and Molly Wood telling me I should change it to not autoplay on an episode of Buzz Out Loud.