Paid Advertising

In return for a small payment many larger companies choose to advertise their sites on other popular sites. This e-marketing usually takes the form of:

1- Banner advertising: Banner impressions are sold by the thousands, and referred to as Cost Per Impression (CPM). As of 2004, prices range from $1/CPM for a run-of-network to about $50/CPM or more for specialized targeted runs. Most popular web sites sell banner advertising space, with the notable exception of Google.

2- Pay per clicks: Advertisers "buy" keywords or keyphrases by bidding on them against other advertisers. The so called Pay-per-click engines sell their premium spaces showing in the searches the highest paying advertisers. Google sells paid advertisement through its AdWords and AdSense systems, which place sponsored links on search pages. Overture, now owned by Yahoo!, is one of the most popular pay-per-click advertising venues.

As users got used to seeing banners, some companies chose to make the advertisements more intrusive – pop-up ads became particularly popular to attract attention. However, most people consider pop-ups a nuisance and several software companies offer free pop-up blockers. Even Microsoft included a pop-up blocker in Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.