PayPerPlay Audio Ads: The Ghost in the Machine

PayPerPlay audio ads has been touted by their market team (one guy, Charles Heflin) as the new wave of internet ad delivery systems. They even promised that publishers would “get paid for every visitor”, but there is a ghost in the machine. The PPP program was supposed to begin delivering 5 to 8 second audio ads to website visitors across the internet on February 1, 2008, whoever due to what seems like poor management the start date was pushed back to February 15 and then to March 1 and again to March 15. As of this writing, the program as yet to reach anything near a successful start.

Heflin and PPP front-man Larry Host have blamed the nonexistent start of Pay Per Play, their broken promises and outright lies on everything from hackers “trying to game the system” to being too good at recruiting publishers. That’s right; they said that Charles (Master Recruiter) Heflin had done such an amazing job of recruiting publishers that they simply could not keep up with the influx of new websites entering the program. The facts appear to be that this program was never properly funded. That would explain for them not performing adequate testing BEFORE recruiting publishers. The performance of the program and the behavior of those involved certainly points to very poor management skills, and at the end of the day it is quite clear that PPP does not have enough advertisers to allow for any reasonable profit by the publishers.

Let’s look at the numbers…

This little bit of brain candy got me booted off the PPP “official” forum.

According to Larry Host, Pay Per Play currently has over 47,000 publishers. Now, I have been doing internet marketing for a long time and when done properly any publisher/sponsor relationship should produce at least $50 per day for the publisher. PPP is currently paying publisher $0.0035 for each ad played. In order to earn $50 with PPP the publisher would have to have 14,286 ads delivered each day. That means that for each of their publishers to make $50, PPP would have to deliver 671,428,571 ads each day. That is over 3100 ads every second of every day! Impossible? For a company that cannot seem to get simple tracking and reporting issues resolved delivering over 600 million ads a day would be like spinning straw into gold; impossible!

Let’s look at some more realistic numbers…

According to the reports by several publishers Pay Per Play is only delivering ads to .5% of the traffic provided by the publishers. If we apply this to the numbers above we get something that makes a little more sense. Look:

671,428,571 x .005 = 3,357,142

That is a little over 3 million ads a day, or 2,331 ads per minute. This looks a little closer to reality.

3 million ads a day would bring in $35,250.00 each day in gross profit for PPP. That also means that their stable of 47,000 publishers would be sharing a pool of only $11,750.00. This would earn each publisher an average of $0.25 per day. Yep, a full quarter a day. We all know that not every publisher is going to be the high-caliber kind that can earn that amount. Many will earn $0.05 and some will earn $0.01. So let’s say that those inexperienced publishers shift the average enough that a really good publisher could earn 400% more than average. Those prolific and aggressive guys might bring home a whopping $1.00 per day.

Understand that these numbers are pure speculation. PayPerPlay has yet to even come close to delivering these kinds of numbers, but it is clear that they are happy to sit back and rake in almost $13 million a year while the best publishers will be lucky to make $365 a year.

All of this is assuming that they even pay publisher at all. PayPerPlay is backed by and operated by the same people that spearheaded the previous failed venture; NetAudioAds and Voice2Page. It has been reported that these two companies failed to, forgot to or outright refused to pay affiliates on a similar scam a few years back. Will they pay on this deal? That remains to be seen, but I encourage anyone that is considering investing any time or any money in the Pay Per Play program to spend the necessary time researching the people involved before they take a leap of faith that might land you on your face.

Can you tell by looking at the traffic stats above that the promise was broken by Pay Per Play on February 1st and then again on March 1st?

I predict that this program will see a steady drop into obilivion.

Today, March 28, 2008, I received the following comment:

John ip: 76.226.217.181 says:3 hours ago

John,

Please provide some data so that we can understand exactly what you mean by "making money". Many people have pointed out that it is FREE to join the Pay Per Play audio program. Charles Heflin has suggested that people use MFA type sites on free hosts to promote the PPP scheme. If you have "no investment other than you time" (words from the PPP forum) then those nickels and dimes would be considered "making money", right?