Commission And Paid Link Pricing Calculation

Throughout the history of the Internet there have been a number of different models of how advertisers would pay. In the early days websites would supply their traffic figures and irregardless of which traffic counting standard was followed (i.e. unique visitors, page impressions, click, etc) an advertising fee was determined in a manner quite similar to brick and mortar advertising standards. Newspapers and magazines use their circulation numbers to determine their rates for example. Television uses "Nielsen Ratings" and radio uses listener surveys.

But the Internet seems to always have had a problem coming up with a suitable standard by which to measure the advertising value of any particular website. The best system developed, so far, seems to be the Pay Per Click system. One significant benefit of PPC is the fact the results are easy to track and adjustments can be instantly made to an ad campaign. If a particular keyword does does bring sales it can be dropped in favor of a more successful one. The one serious drawback to PPC however has been its susceptibility to click fraud. Though a conscientious advertiser who tracks his PPC campaigns will be looking at the return on investment of his advertising dollar and won't really be too affected by click fraud it is still a little unnerving to know a percentage of the clicks paid for are not legitimate. A new move is being attempted to move more to a "Pay Per Action" payment system as a result of click fraud.

COMMISSIONS

BungeeBones commissions, which is the basis by which our subscription webmasters get paid, can most closely be categorized as a Pay Per Action system. Webmasters who host one of our subscription directories or one who places an affiliate link or banner on their site will be compensated for every "action" taken to purchase a paid link from their website. Either a site is a paid link or a free link. There is no where to hide and no opportunity for fraud. It is a fairly straightforward system.

PRICING

BungeeBones pricing system is a little more complicated than the commission system. It isn't difficult in the sense that it is hard to calculated what your commission would be for any paid link in a particular category. That is readily available and published for the advertiser when they submit their link. The system BungeeBones uses to determine the prices, however, have deliberately been made a bit more complicated in order to make the pricing responsive to the market place. When comparing web directory advertising in comparison to Pay Per Click one major difference between the two is Pay Per Click's ability to vary its pricing among the different keywords. Directories have, traditionally, stuck with a flat fee system and charged the same irregardless of the categories popularity.

BungeeBones pricing goal, then,  is to have each category's price rise or lower based on its demand. Categories related to LAW for example will sell for a higher price than those related to Little League Baseball. Accurate pricing of the innumerable possible categories would be an enormous task. Not only would it consume a large amount of resources it would be extremely difficult to price it as accurately as Pay Per Click can.

While Pay Per Click pits one webmaster against another in an auction system to arrive at its prices, BungeeBones is willing to have the webmasters within a category set their own price. Once a category reaches the 20 link threshold population email ballots will be sent to all subscriber members in the category to establish its price. Once the price is determined emails will be sent to all the websites with links in it. They will be presented the option to pay the category price and remain in the category or to login to their control panel and move their listing to a new category or default and let BungeeBones move it.

 

What do sites give up by not being in the paid program? Because each subscription site decides whether to display free links or not and, if so, for how long, then free link sites miss out on the incoming traffic from the members who elect not to send traffic to free links (but send it to paying members).