Out of everything in the modern world, it is the internet and technology that is growing the fastest. It is staggering to say the least that there are 1 billion unique visitors to YouTube every month alone.With this growth brings new forms of advertising online. It all started off with PPC and AdWords back in 1999. Now, there are 4-5 decent forms of online advertising to choose from for both publishers and advertisers. For this reason, I will look at the different forms of advertising online and judge whether it is best to use for both advertisers and publishers.
 
 

Banner Advertising

Advertisers

Banner advertising displays adverts in one location on one website for a fixed time of usually 30 days. The benefit advertisers will gain from this is that there is only one cost which is fixed – if they gain millions of clicks, they will still only pay one price. However, this can also work against them if the advert under performs for them. However, if the advertiser has created a good image advert, they should find that they will gain a low CPC on average.

Publishers

The publisher side to banner advertising requires publishers to advertise their website to advertisers so that advertisers will want to buy their advertising spaces. If you can sell all your units, you will find yourself gaining a consistently high income. However, most websites that use banner advertising will find it hard to sell their advertising spaces which means that they cannot continually make money every second of every day with them – you only earn when the units are bought.
 
 

PPC

Advertisers

Pay per click advertising works by using keywords to display relevant adverts from advertisers onto search engines and websites on a pay per click basis. The good thing about this is that you can control your campaign’s budget. What more, you can also foreshadow how much traffic you will gain from PPC through dividing your budget by your maximum CPC. With Google leading PPC, its not a bad shout to use this form of advertising.

Publishers

Publishers of PPC will learn that they can make money continually with PPC. As long as the advert can be viewed on their website, the traffic will see it with there being a possibility of it being clicked. Therefore, once you have installed the advert, just let the advert do the rest of the work! With so many advertisers in PPC, you will find yourself gaining a high CPC meaning a high income.
 
 

In-Text

Advertisers

In-text advertising, for advertisers, is not as contextual as PPC as they relate the adverts from advertisers to 1-2 words from the content of websites. This means that it can be difficult for advertisers to advertise their advert to the web user. For example, an advert on cars may only appear when the web user hovers over a phrase such as ‘petrol prices’. Although related to cars, it is not related enough to gain advertisers a respectable conversion rate.

Publishes

After using in-text advertising as an experiment, I found that, because there are not many advertisers, the CPC is ridiculously low (in the cents). This means you can gain hundreds of clicks but still only earn a couple of dollars. Compare that to PPC where if you got hunderd of clicks with them, you will find yourself much better off.
 
 
Just from looking at three forms of advertising, the best option for both advertisers and publishers has to be PPC. Although banner advertising can work to some advertisers’ advantage, PPC is safe, reliable and cheap form of contextual traffic.