Garner Consulting, LLC

I saw some of the results of this first hand as PPC's started dropping precipitously months ago across a broad range of product categories. As this article suggests, perhaps a better model is "CPA," or "Cost Per Action." With the right safeguards and security built into the model, it should provide much better accountability for true direct response results.

Due to the relative "flatness" and ease of getting into the adserving business, and the fact that in many cases, everyone in the value chain benefits by getting more clicks, the whole business model is just asking to be full of fraud and unscrupulous players. Unfortunately more than a few are focused on getting rich quick and moving on to the next thing before anyone catches them.

The big boys, Yahoo, Google, and MSN, have continued to drag their feet because they are reaping millions from it. It appears that advertisers may finally be responding by pulling money out of the PPC channel. That's the only way to get things to change.

Ad Age article