Pay-Per-Play Media: I Was Wrong. TC Competitors Should All Sign Up

pppmedia.jpgI wrote last night about an advertising service from Pay-Per-Play Media that sees 5 second audio ads automatically playing when visiting websites. Annoying would be the nicer way of describing screeching audio ads for Tacos playing when you visit a website, a sure way to drive visitors away would be another take on it.

When writing about a service like this, there is always the very real possibility that the old adage of “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” will ring true…indeed I wouldn’t be surprised for example if that everytime we wrote about PayPerPost in the past they ended up with more users. Pay-Per-Play Media got that exact boost, and Pay-Per-Play’s Director of Marketing Charles Heflin sent me this nice email to let me know:

Dude,

You really made yourself and tech crunch look bad with your post about Pay-Per-Play media.

Did you know that $.01 per play is a $10 CPM? Well above industry standard?

Only the geeks with a chip on their shoulder agreed with you. Apparently the rest of the crowd liked the idea… LOL

Do you have any studies or proof that 5 second audio ads actually drive visitors away?

Your “feelings” don’t count… Only facts count.

Oh… thank you for the post BTW … we received over 500 new signups covering 27,000 new websites as a result of the traffic you raised… and counting.

Apparently because no one has studied annoying audio ads on websites, they aren’t annoying.

Having considered Charles’ email, I’ve come to the conclusion that I was wrong. I now encourage EVERYONE to sign up to Pay-Per-Play Media, particularly TechCrunch’s competitors. If you’re running a website, I’d encourage you to get ALL of your competitors to sign up as well….indeed, I really, really hope this takes off in a big way. We wont be running it, so I guess we’ll be the ones who will miss out