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Are Audio Ads The Way To Monetize Your Website?

Posted on January 30, 2008
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I first heard about Net Audio Ads a few weeks back when they began seeking bloggers to advertise their Pay Per Play ads via the other PPP: PayPerPost. This created quite a bit of controversy due to the nature of the ads. Don’t get me wrong, the ads themselves aren’t objectionable in any way. In fact, they’re fairly innovative. Instead of displaying an advertising banner or a list of text links to be clicked upon by site visitors a short 5 second audio clip is played. This is where the controversy comes in…

Many, many web surfers get exceedingly irritated when a web page plays audio automatically. Add to that the fact that this audio is advertising and you can see where this is heading. Personally, I’m with the no audio crowd. If I want to hear your audio I’m perfectly capable of clicking on a start button. But making me find a stop button is presuming quite a bit on the webmaster’s part. For that very reason I will never use these ads here at Philaahzophy.

However, that doesn’t mean I won’t use them anywhere. I run more than a dozen different websites, all of which target different audiences and completely different purposes. I’m still a bit hesitant about these ads, but I’ve just signed up to try them on a couple of different sites. What changed my mind? Well, my mind isn’t actually changed, yet, but I’m always encouraging people to experiment with different things and it seems I should do this experiment before writing off the possible revenue.

Audio ads have one major advantage over other website monetization techniques - you are paid for 100% of your traffic. No interaction is required on the part of your web visitors whatsoever. Besides there’s always that chance that Net Audio Ads will turn into the next Adsense and their three tier affiliate program is only available to those webmasters who sign up before February 1st. So if I’m ever going to try it out, this is definitely the time.