Since this hub discusses an issue with a certain amount of jargon, a brief explanation of such terms might be useful:

• PTC: Pay to click
• PPC: Pay per click
• Advertiser: Business or company seeking exposure, sale of products and/or promotion of company image
• Agent: Owner of PPC business, the market leader being Google's AdSense
• Webmaster/Third party: Person in charge of content on a website, typically the owner
• User: Anyone browsing the web, finding sites via search engines, bookmarks, social bookmarking websites, e mail links etc

This request poses an interesting question and might concern the possibility of clicking affiliate advertisements on one's own website.. Without exception, all PTC/PPC campaigns have a clause in their contract that specifically states a webmaster must never click an advertisement in his or her own website, since it generates false profit. While I am perfectly happy to discuss PTC and PPC campaigns, I am not condoning the practice of clicking on advertisements found on one's own websites with the sole intention of raising revenue. Apart from being in breach of contract, it is extremely easy for the agent to trace such clicks and Google are particularly adept at tracking fraudulent activity. An occasional accidental click by the webmaster is usually excused and not recorded as fraud.

PTC or PPC campaigns rely on an agreement, contact or trust between an advertiser, agent (such as Google's AdSense) and a third party website. It allows advertisers to spread their product, image or brand name over a far wider internet presence than his own website. Usually, they pay an agreement fee to the agents of the PPC campaign - the market leader is Google's AdSense - who then posts the requested advertisement on a selection of websites already under contract or agreement. Every time the advertisement is clicked on the website by a user, it triggers a sequence and forwards the user to a particular page on the advertiser's website. There is a mistaken belief that every click results in a commission to the second party by the agent; this is not necessarily the case and they might only be paid when the user continues beyond a certain level in the advertiser's website, buys a product, signs up to a newsletter or downloads a file containing more information supplied by the advertiser. Irrespective of any of these actions, the agent always takes a fee from the advertiser for every user click.

This business is worth billions of dollars to agents such as Google, Yahoo's Search Marketing and Microsoft's adCentre. The crux to their business is their effectiveness as a search engine - despite competition from Yahoo and Microsoft, Google remains the market leader. Virtually all Google searches result in an appropriate (inappropriate, some might suggest) selection of sponsored advertisements, encouraging the user towards the AdSense advertiser.

The usefulness of these practices are apparent, particularly to agents and advertisers. Webmasters get revenue that they might not otherwise generate, although a website packed with advertisements is (ironically) given a lower rating or page rank by the search engine giants such as Google. Many webmasters think that AdSense will make a lot of money - unless your site is taking tens of thousands of hits per day, you are unlikely to give up your day job. However, it can provide a useful revenue and assist towards the cost of your domain name and server costs.