Is your attention worth more than mine?
Today, most advertisers pay the same amount to serve 1,000 ads to a hyper-connected super-influencer as they do to my granny (granny only rarely uses the Web and has relatively few followers on Twitter). The CPM, or ‘cost per mille’, is undifferentiated from user to user – despite the fact that some users are very much more influential than others: the value is crudely determined by the advertiser, the site and the quality of your sales team.
It’s true that there are snazzy behavioural targeting technologies that allow site owners to gain a higher degree of individual insight – for example, by tracking which sites and what type of content they have been visiting and consuming before arriving at yours – but the basic, flat-rate same-CPM-for-everyone is still the prevailing model for monetising online visits in the UK and US.
