Online Advertising
Digital media’s big sale push worldwide may centre on how easy it is for marketers to measure the performance of online advertising campaigns, but such issues tend to get pushed to the side in China, home to the world’s largest internet population. Most online advertising in the Middle Kingdom, much like neighbouring Japan and Korea, is not priced by how many people have seen an ad, or how many people were intrigued enough to click on it, but how long an ad is posted on a site. There has been no shortage of forecasting over the years, predicting the demise of a pricing model criticized as an antiquated old media legacy by detractors, but the reason it is still used in China is because that’s the way most online advertisers, usually small and medium-sized companies with limited resources, like it. Cost-per-day not only has the benefit of familiarity, but with credible data thin on the ground it also provides a relatively reliable way of gauging the reach of digital campaigns.