What is PPV or Pay Per View Marketing?  I was first introduced to this form of traffic by Gauher Chaudhry and his product, Pay Per View Formula. He made an excellent argument about the pitfalls and shortcomings of affiliate marketing through Google’s PPC(pay per click) and talked about the wonderful benefits of this new method described as Pay Per View. As a long time PPC Marketer, I knew exactly what he was talking about regarding PPC. Being a long term customer of Gauher’s Pay Per Click Formula, when he decided to launch PPVF, I jumped at it.

PPV in a nutshell is Adware. Although we all associate this term with something bad, most of the PPV Networks are eTRUST verified. Users agree to be shown ads in exchange for something free such as screensavers, games, toolbars, etc. This is not harmful to the users computer and simply displays ads fairly infrequently as to not interfere with the users overall browsing experience.

How PPV Works…

Generally, an affiliate advertiser or advertising agency signs up with a PPV Network such as TrafficVance, and from here it works in much the same way as PPC. You can bid on keywords and when a user searches with that keyword, a popup window with your ad will display over the current window they are browsing. Better yet, you can bid directly on urls. This will cause your ad to appear as a popup over the current window whenever that url appears in the users address bar. Let’s say you are promoting an Auto Insurance Offer. You open an account with a PPV Network and bid on the url geico.com. Now when a user with the adware installed types www.geico.com into the their address bar, your ad will appear on top of www.geico.com.

The Benefits…

Besides the obvious ability to laser target your ads is the fact that keywords and urls are much cheaper to bid on compared to PPC Ads. There are many advantages to this form of traffic once you learn how to utilize it.

The Downfalls…

Several Affiliate Marketing companies spefically ban the use of PPV Traffic in their Terms of Service. Although many ban this traffic source, several will allow you to use it if you contact them and sign an addendum.

While I can type all day regarding the advantages of PPV Traffic such as the reduced bid costs in proportion to PPC Marketing and ability to laser target your ads, the KEY to succeeding is finding the right information. While Pay Per View Formula was a great introductory course, and I don’t regret purchasing it for one second, it was just that… an introductory course. The methods described are rather general and if you were to follow the herd, you would find yourself spending alot of money with very little results. To date, there are absolutely no PPV Informational products offering anything more than rehashed information from Pay Per View Formula. Believe me when I tell you that there are only a handful of us who actually know how to make a fortune with PPV Traffic and none of us are using these rehashed methods and tools. With PPV, more so than any other form of traffic, you need to be able to think outside the box. It’s the little things that make a huge difference.