Pay Per Play: Break Internet Style Rules, Make Lots of Money

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.

The debate as to whether this is acceptable practice ranges to many different circles. MySpace and Digg have both been called out before in the comments and emails we’ve recieved here at Mashable for occasionally letting an advertisement slip by that has autoplaying advertisements. The podcasting world also goes back and forth on whether it is kosher to have your podcast or video episodes autoplay on pageload. On my own personal blog and video ventures over the years, I’ve been experimenting with the benefits and negatives of autoplaying for years, and have generally come to the conclusion that if I have audio or video that I want to showcase in a website, I will make it autoplay.

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.

Granted, there is a significant difference between an autoplaying advertisement, and a fifteen second autoplaying advertisement followed by a podcast full of relevant content, but having said that, the Pay Per Play concept isn’t so aesthetically repugnant as the design snobs among us might originally think. Certainly the thought of it is counter-intuitive at first, but aren’t most revolutionary new concepts that way?