After many years of leaving webpages up on my monitors while I do other things, I realized that literally billions of impressions of ads are made to people who aren’t there. My Yahoo was my homepage for years – over 10, always providing me all of the news I wanted to see when I opened an IE window. It was always updated, no matter when I looked at it — and hearing the ‘click’ of a page loading was always going on in my absence from the computer.
So, blind impressions – impressions of an ad to an absent audience, away from their computer and having their ad triggered by an auto-refresh definition in the page itself – are making the CPM advertisers of the world billions. BILLIONS.
This would not include CPC ads, as no user is there to interact with the refreshing pages, keeping that part of the industry honest – but after being in the online ad industry for an extended period, noting that the largest of portals often suffer from the worst response rates, it’s no wonder – nobody’s home!
Sites with auto-refreshing pages are NOT all bad. Reuters is a great example – their pages refresh, however their ads do NOT change, so some are keeping themselves honest, however if on a CPM basis, they are generating an additional ad view – and that would not be legit.
Ask your advertising outlet about their policy on auto-refresh – or do the right thing and load their page you intend to be on, and let it sit there – see what happens.
It can be eye opening.
