Search engines are all about pay per click these days. It’s part of the revolution that happened with Google’s add-money advent of adwords. But since Google launched its pay per click model, other search companies have followed suit.
The idea of course is simple – allow advertisers to pay only for visitors that click through their ads. I (me as a service and goods provider) decide how much I will pay for a click, and then Google determines the placement of my ad to maximize their profit – clickthrough percentage times clickthrough revenue.
For me the advertiser it seems I’m getting a good deal, but no…. that’s not the case. It just offloads the job of me calculating the clickthrough rate myself and saves me from having to figure out what I’m willing to pay per impression on the front end. But I still have to figure out how much of my revenue per visitor I’m willing to set aside.
There are problems with pay-per-click, and no actual advantages, for me the advertiser. But still there are few effective alternatives for businesses who primarily sell via the ‘net.
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Satellite internet connections have for a few years been a good substitute for direct wired broadband connections in rural areas. The first satellite internet systems used the orb in the sky to beam down a fast signal, and used a modem to send data back upstream. Even though it takes 2-3 seconds for the page request to get from your computer up into orbit and back down to earth and out on the internet, once the page started coming, it came fast. That worked okay – but was a bit slow for lots of uses particularly if you wanted to email an image to your grandson or whatnot.
With the advent of services like Wild Blue that have true satellite uplinks as well as downstream, things got better! Sending files became more responsive, but there’s still a large lag problem because the signal has to travel up to a satellite and back. Gaming, of course, doesn’t really work well over this kind of laggy (or high latency) connection.
Now, there’s another problem. Boom. Boom. Boom…. the death knoll for Sattelite Internet. Web 2.0. Boom. Boom. Boom. You can hear the drumbeats in the distance.
The reason things are getting bad again is that the lag time is becoming a problem. Web 2.0 web-based applications work by sending bits of data back and forth between your computer and a web server on the internet. From periodic saving, to getting the contents of a dropdown menu…. from moving the mouse around in a document to positioning and streaming of video….. Web based applications require frequent small communications between your computer and a web server.
That doesn’t work well when it takes 3 seconds for your “hello!!!! I’m here!” to get from one end to the other and back. I’m using my mom’s Wild Blue connection now, and there’s a lot of things I simply can’t do. I can’t watch video on Ted.Com. (I suppose I could download them.) Most interactive websites just don’t work at all. Gmail works. That’s nice! Chat… kinda works.. Those “software update” tools don’t work. They often get the mistaken impression that the connection goes down. It doesn’t. It’s just slow.
The new breed of web-enabled apps need reasonable latency. You don’t need uber-fast connection speeds, but uber-slow just doesn’t cut it. I’m not so wild about wild blue anymore.