There is a new form of Internet Advertising called Pay Per Play.  Pay Per Play allows you to can earn revenue from ads that play on your own sites, as well as ads that play on your referral's sites.

What is Pay Per Play?

When someone visits a website with Pay Per Play code embedded in it, a 5-second audio ad is played. When the ad is played you get a commission. It's as simple as that.

You are probably familiar with "Pay Per Click," or "PPC," where a webmaster is paid every time a visitor clicks on an ad on his site. Pay Per Play is similar.  But in this case, the webmaster is paid for the times an audio ad is played for his site visitors, regardless of whether his visitors clicks on anything.

One of the main advantages of Pay Per Play is that it does not take up any "screen space" or "virtual real estate." In other words, you do not have to deal with design issues or "trying to fit it in somewhere". The ad is purely audio, and there are no visual elements to add to your site.

This also means that visitors will not be led off your site in the same way they are with Pay Per Click advertising. There is no link for them to click. You are paid when they audio is played.

There is, however, a "Key to Page" option, where a visitor would be told to press a certain key on his keyboard in order to get more information. If you opt in to run these types of ads on your site, you will be paid when a person "keys" to the advertiser's website.

Pay Per Play, or PPP, is powered by a company called Voice2Page.

To set up Pay Per Play ads, once you have registered (which is very fast and also is free), all you need to do is to place the code on the webpage or pages that you want the ads to play on. You can selectively omit pages that you do not want audio ads played on, choose to place the code only on a certain page, or choose to place the code on each web page.

One thing I like about Pay Per Play is that they do now allow sleazy or questionable ads. They will also not play ads on websites with pornographic, illegal, or hate content.

The ads they play are five seconds long. Per survey, five seconds is long enough to leave an impression about the product, but short enough so as not to annoy one. Testing has also indicated that ads of this length do not drive visitors away. There is also the option of placing thirty-second ads on certain pages, if you decide to do this.  This ads of course pay more.

Why is Pay Per Play such a big deal?

Per marketing trends, the Internet is starting to replace radio and TV to a marked degree. Radio and TV advertising are not as powerful as they once were. We see this when we see Internet TV and Internet "radio stations." Also, more and more people use their MP3 player, iPod, or cell phone to play their custom music. So Radio Advertising is not as powerful as it once was.

The larger advertising companies have started to realize this, and thus there is a trend toward moving the main advertising media over to the Internet.

Why do I consider that Pay Per Play could be a sleeping giant?

Pay Per Play is just starting up. They have started running their ads but they are still largely "on the runway." They are very much in beta, and there are certain steps that still need to be taken before the full potential of the program can be unleashed.

Pay Per Play is a completely new form of marketing. But regardless, their start-up statistics are impressive. It is still in its "beginning stages." And with these beginning stages comes of course the inevitable - controversy! So you will find plenty of online criticism of Pay Per Play, just as you will find people applauding it.

Personally I think the fact that its beginning stages could be to your advantage. This is due to the following reasons:

1. In addition to commissions for straight Pay Per Play advertising, there is also an excellent referral program.

If you sign someone else up to run Pay Per Play ads, you will receive a commission on all the ads played on their sites in the future. And if that person signs someone else up, you will receive a commission on that person's ads as well. It is basically a three-tier referral program.

In other words, you could wind up with a lifetime residual income just by signing people up to join the program.

This referral program will not always be open. When it closes, people will only be able to sign up as ad publishers but they will not be eligible to sign up as referrers who can earn commissions by signing up other webmasters.

That means it is a good idea to sign up now.

Remember, the percentage you get paid is a percentage of what the advertiser pays for an ad to play. It is not a percentage of what your referral receives.

Currently, the commission structure is as follows:

Ads played on your own sites: 25% Ads played on your referral's sites: 5% Ads played on your referral's referral's sites: 5%

2. They also give commissions if you sign people up to have their own ads played on other people's websites. In other words, you can refer people to advertise with this program and generate commissions on that as well.

3. It is free to sign up with Pay Per Play, and it only takes a couple of minutes. So really there is no risk involved.

4. One of the reasons that Pay Per Play has not yet taken off to its full potential is because there are a lot more webmasters who have signed up to run the ads, than there are ad publishers. This is because the referral program has been so popular to people like you and me!

Voice2Page (the company that runs Pay Per Play) and its affiliates are currently working on recruiting new ad publishers.

A major accomplishment in this direction was getting the recent BPA Audit completed.  Getting this completed takes the brakes off of recruiting additional advertisers.

5. I did a calculation recently with my own Pay Per Play account. In a given period of time I earned about $14.00. Not very impressive, right? So then why am I promoting this?

Well, in that period of time, my referral's ads played about once for every twenty page impressions. In other words, if Pay Per Play would be at its full potential, with as many ads as there are advertisers, my commission would be about 20 times as much for that period of time ($280). This is just commissions I would earn for ads which play on other people's websites. But there is more to it - it only reflects the traffic on sites where the PPP code has been embedded. Many webmasters (including my own referrals), have not yet placed the PPP code on their sites.

So what if, a few months or a year from now, Pay Per Play does take off? What if it even begins to replace Adsense, and TV Advertising? At that point we might find numerous companies wanting to participate in the program (which is far less expensive for them, than other advertising methods).

That would mean that anyone who thought fast at the beginning of the program will be duly rewarded.

What if you sign up 50 webmasters for the program? Depending on the traffic their sites get, you could theoretically wind up with hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in commissions, just from the ads played on their sites.

Of course there is always the possibility that Pay Per Play never becomes what we hope it will be. And if we take the trouble of spending a few minutes signing up and promoting it now, we might kick ourselves later for wasting that 20 minutes.

But then again, what if it does take off. What if it becomes the new Adsense? Well, if that happens, I think those of us who didn't risk wasting those two to twenty minutes will be kicking ourselves a lot harder.

The fact is that Pay Per Play looks like it could become really big. If it does, those who got in early can consider themselves lucky. And if it doesn't, nothing is really lost, as it didn't cost anything to start off with.