Time Based Ads Fail to Take Off

A year ago, The Financial Times and The Economist made waves when they announced they would charge some advertisers based on how long readers spent on a Web page with an ad in view, rather than the number of people who saw the ad. It was a sign of hope for some in the online publishing industry, who saw this metric as a way to reward the sites that have a committed readership, and jumpstart a stagnant online ad market.

But the optimism for any significant change in the near term has largely faded. While those two publications have continued to offer time-based advertising for some campaigns, ad executives said they weren’t aware of any other sites that have adopted the metric. An executive with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade organization, said that the metric hasn’t been widely adopted enough for them to even track how many publications use it.