First of all, before we get out of the starting gate, I want to point out that anything I say here is not an indictment of StumbleUpon (SU) and those freelance sites that pay contributors based on the number of page hits their articles receive (e.g., Triond and Associated Content (AC)).

In fact, I'm a fan of SU and a frequent contributor at both Triond and AC.

All I'm doing here is making a couple of observations and wondering about things out loud. The folks who run the organizations mentioned above have surely already thought this stuff through and probably have already made adjustments for it.

In the old days, like last year, if you submitted an article at Triond or AC, it had to be pretty good writing for it to receive a significant number of page hits. You could gather all the "friends" you wanted, but if you didn't write good stuff, even those friends were going to be reluctant to spend their time reading your blather.

By "good stuff" I mean writing that is well organized (i.e., there's some sort of flow that is at least somewhat logical or followable); the writing is correct grammatically (its and it's are used correctly, along with their / there / they're, whose / who's, and object pronouns are used when they're supposed to be used); and the spelling is correct.

The author also had to do considerable "marketing" of the article; link to it from a blog, send the link to friends via email, etc.

Now, the writers at sites such as Triond and AC are paid, at least in part, through money earned from advertisers. At Triond, the advertiser agrees that his ad can go on a certain article for a certain pay per view rate. Triond gets half that money; the author gets the other half.

Naturally, it's in the author's best interest (and Triond's best interest too) to get as many page hits as possible on that article.

The issue that is raised is this. How does the inflation of page hits affect the effectiveness of the advertising, when those page hits are unsolicited by the recipient?

When a potential reader visits a site looking for a specific article, or an article in a specific category, the ads associated with that article are probably going to be somewhat relevant to the reader's interests. For example, suppose the reader wants to learn about beekeeping. He searches for beekeeping articles, and follows links from the search engine. Assuming that the ads are matched as closely as possible to the articles, he may find ads that are meaningful to him. The actuarials predict that of those types of people who visit a site with those particular ads, a certain number of people will respond to those ads.

The game changes when people get to a site via stumbling. When a site is placed in front of a reader so that it can get a page hit, whether or not the reader wanted to look at that page, the advertiser will end up paying for that viewer even though he may be less likely to pay attention to the ad. If lots of such users are found, the advertiser could end up paying for the views even though the site visitors aren't paying attention to the ads.

For example, someone who intentionally goes to an article about football will be more interested in the advertisements attached to that article than my grandmother, who may get to that article just because she stumbled her way there. Grandma at this point in her life has no interest in athletic products.  Do pay per page view sites take this into account?

The advertisers are still paying for page hits, and with StumbleUpon it's easy to blast a link to hundreds of people in one shot. Thus, the numbers of page hits are rapidly rising. However, the percentage of people who are interested in the associated advertisements, I'll bet, is significantly lower than it used to be.

Make sense?

Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It seems like an interesting economics lesson to me though.

Any thoughts or comments? Am I way off base in my thinking, or does this seem to be a reasonable question?