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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but wonder why all advertisers don't switch to payment by click-through-and-buy, rather than just by click or impression. You can't fake that.

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Ad networks won't go for it outside of very specific and narrow use cases (high-end ecommerce) because they don't have control over the quality of the landing page, a crucial element in whether the user converts or not.

Exactly. Ad networks will optimize for cost per acquisition but won't charge based on it since they don't control that part of the pipeline.

If advertiser's landing page is down for example, the loss shouldn't fell on the ad network.

It's not really a "loss" though. It's not like there is a significant marginal cost to serving static content.

Ad network can mean many different things.

In case of facebook where their ad network controls the whole process (SSP + Exchange + DSP) they would only lose, besides the infrastructure cost, the opportunity to make money by serving another ad.

But for the majority of ad serving world it's not that simple. If you're for example a DSP and buy ad impressions from exchanges via real time bidding, you have to pay for the impression even if you can't charge the advertisers for it. So you lose money twice. You don't serve another ad which would make you money and you have to pay for an ad that won't be paid for by the advertiser.

Meh, crocodile tears. If they shouldn't have to pay in the rare case that my site is down, then I shouldn't have to pay in the more-common-than-not case that there is no real person behind the click. And note that I have an incentive to keep my site up, whereas they apparently have no incentive to keep click-fraud down, evidenced by the fact that it's more than 50% of the case.

It doesn't matter how you decide to buy/pay for your impressions because it gets normalized by their ad system to an effective eCPM (revenue per 1000 impressions). Let's say you only want to pay via a "click-through-and-buy", after a certain number of impressions and clicks they will have a benchmark for how much in commissions were paid. They take that number, divide by impressions/clicks, and then have an eCPM to rank you by. If the eCPM achieved by allocating impressions to your campaign is less than via traditional CPM or CPC based buys then you will get lower allocation and thus the system optimizes you out of inventory.

Because most advertising isn't for quick one-time online purchases.

That seems like a harder thing for the advertisers to measure than impressions or click-throughs and incentivizes the sponsor of the ad to lie about units sold.

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