Morgan says he's seeing these rates drop slightly as more publishers launch Web sites that are advertiser supported, and ad agencies become more demanding as a result. The competition for Web ad banners is tough, and getting worse from the publisher's perspective. The next trend emerging is advertisers' demands to pay for clickthroughs rather than impressions. If the advertiser does a lousy job and few people click on the banner, that's out of your control. That's what you should be getting paid for.
Some analysts believe clickthroughs are the holy grail of Web publishing.
The closer a publisher can bring an advertiser to an actual sale, the higher a CPM the advertiser will be willing to pay. A discounted CPM for impressions might be offered, with a per-click fee paid on top of that, for example. A straight clickthrough revenue strategy makes little sense without a reasonable minimum guarantee of what the publisher will receive from the advertiser. The major advertisers only get excited over gross numbers, notes Morgan. The only way for smaller newspaper publishers to compete for advertising dollars then, says Morgan, is to aggregate impressions from multiple newspaper Web sites.