In the pre–multimedia Internet era, it was was easy- you just looked at page views, unique visits and demographics. But all of that is changing now . . . and at lightning speed.  Read how Internet TV and web 2.0 applications are reshuffling the rules of engagement.

Presenting your site’s activity to advertising agencies, partners, investors or sponsors is becoming tricky. It seems that the new Web 2.0 type of applications together with the heavy usage of Internet TV and Flash multimedia have completely changed the rules of the game. No one really knows exactly how to cope with the new standards. Actually that seems to be the problem, there are no suitable standards.  In the old Internet days, the number of visitors coming to a website indicated, almost linearly, the opportunity for an advertiser or a marketer to engage with potential customers. Click through rates (CTR) multiplied nicely with conversation rates which made ROI easy to optimize, even to “mathematically challenged” marketers.  Then came Web 2.0 with Ajax applications that introduced usability changes and eliminated page refreshes. As the distance between TV and Internet narrows as well, calculating advertising power has become quite tricky.  The latest Nielson report suggested that measuring website performance should more heavily rely on time spent on site measurements. However, the popularity of tab browsing seriously discounts their logic. Some attempts are made today to count relevancy browsing, attention span crossed together with demographics and behavioral data. It seems, however, that until we place a WiFi chip in each web user brain, ambiguity will continue to rule!   
From what I have been observing lately, the growth of CPA demonstrates, more then anything else going on, the acknowledgment of site owners that that getting traffic to convert is more art than science. Tab browsing makes CPM incompetent. We know how many people came to a website, but we don’t really know how long they stay or if they actually even noticed our ads. There is no standard, — in television they measure ranking and even account for channel zapping and bathroom breaks.  Many advertisers don’t care anymore about using traffic to measure exposure that could have been merely “tabbed under”.  But advertisers will be very happy to share profits with affiliates and CPA if they end up bringing business.

But how do you deliver CPA traffic from a video stream? Now, we start to see new technologies arising to handle the challenge.  I personally like videoegg’s implementation. But there is no leading standard . . . yet.