Views Have Long Been Digital Advertising’s Currency. Those Days May Be Numbered.
It was a was a throwaway line on the 50th slide in a PowerPoint deck. But that seemingly innocuous bullet point — “Time as a currency to trade?” — stands to upend the digital-advertising industry.
In March 2013, Jon Slade, commercial director of digital advertising and insight at the Financial Times, presented the idea to the paper’s Asia sales staff. Next month, the London-based paper will roll out ad rates based on time rather than impressions, charging some advertisers by the number of hours their ads appear in front of targeted groups of readers. The measurement — cost per hour, or CPH — shatters a decades-old media pricing model that values volume above all else…
“We’re definitely challenging the status quo. No one has come up with
a new currency in digital advertising in — a while.”
This moment matters for publishers like the FT, according to Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, formerly the Online Publishers Association. “We’re in a medium that’s fast changing and evolving,” he said.
“I’m hoping we’ll look back a decade from now and see this
as a critical milestone.”
