Thanks!
]]>Regarding Gary's comment about advertising Windows software... why DON'T they do a little $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] magic to ensure that people don't get ads targeted to other operating systems?
Remember how fast ALLADVANTAGE.com spread?
For your scheme to work with adsense, however, google needs to track and pay out based on cost-per-conversion, not per clicks. Everyone would be gaming the system. Or if you had to limit the number of clicks, it wouldn't be that big of an incentive.
For some of their customers/advertisers, I believe they already know whether the click is resulting in a sale. So, they could start this immediately.
So, using gmail or google would be like using a coupon.
This would be the killer app. Advertisers are happy because they pay only for sales. Consumers are happy because you are saving them money.
This is a HUGE IDEA!
Google should be buying or partnering with an affiliate advertising network to test this concept.
Why bother?
They're already correctly targeted for 95% of users, and the remaining 5% aren't likely to click the links (thusly costing the advertiser nothing) anyways.
]]>You have a good idea here, but are forgetting one main thing: Google's way of repaying us for putting up with the (happily unobtrusive) advertising is to NOT charge us to use Gmail or the gig of storage that we get with it. Even if you were able to sell them on the idea that they owed users some money for clicks on links, that amount would be so small that it would cease to be an incentive to click (probably in the vicinity of a penny). Our real incentive is the relevance of the ad, which is why I like Google: everyone wins. We find out more about things that actually matter to us, and advertisers reach their target market in one of the most effective and efficient methods yet devised. (I'm a marketing student, can you tell?)
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