AJAX is the order of the day for a clean, fast user experience. But this creates a problem with the sites that heavily rely on advertising as their revenue stream. If the page doesn’t refresh, how would they get more impressions? For example, if you see the cricket score page of cricketnext, you’ll notice they could’ve easily implemented AJAX and refreshed only the scorecard div. But they haven’t. The whole page refreshes agonizingly slowly (all the young India from IT companies must be pointing their browsers to this page on critical moments), making the users anxious and frustrated.
I was wondering why don’t they refresh the ads while refreshing the content? they could just count it as a new impression…sounds intuitive isn’t it? It’s nothing of a rocket science on technical front. The problem is, IAB guidelines were not very specific in this matter. They have now released specific counting guidelines for Rich Internet Applications.
This article by Eric Picard sums it up nicely. The article is written on June 2006 though. With the new guidelines, I hope, more and more publishers will embrace AJAX (or flash… or silverlight…but just refresh relevant content god damn it !!!) without apprehension of not having enough impressions because of AJAX.
But the publishers will need tools…just guidelines are not enough. You know who can really create a thrust in this regard…yes…the omnipresent Google. If only Google integrates auto-ad-refresh in GWT, which talks seamlessly to AdSense to fetch ads on AJAX actions…
I was also wondering whether there is some scheme for publishers, which allows them to use CPM and CPC at the same time…think about it…the advertiser wants branding as well as concrete customer convesion…so they’ll pay some low CPM for impressions…but whenever a user clicks…the publisher gets some top-up bonus…but not sure whether such schemes exist…do you know?
