A clearer way to write this would be, pay-per-impression stopped being the default (or only) way of doing business sometime between 1999-2001. After a brief period where
ads were predominantly text-based, ad inflation brought
graphical ads and CPM back and nowadays can do CPC as well
as CPM or CPA (cost per acquisition) links:
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2472725?hl=en&ref_...
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds
mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising
dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily
from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.
Practically all of the advertising on the internet is purchased on per impression basis. It falls into 2 categories:
1) Advertisers paying straight per mille i.e. mr. Proper, Coca-Cola, Lays, etc. Direct outcomes are secondary to them (at best). This is the ovewhelming majority of the display ad spend. Yes, you read that right. The majority of the online ad spend does not care about sales on a website.
2) CPC based ads (ala adwords). Although you are charged per click, this is primarily because it is easier to explain to you. At the end of the day, there are back end calculations in google (the most famous one being called "quality score"), which transform per-click to per-mille. The reason for that is as simple as supply and demand.
This is true for all publishers who sell on CPC. They calculate how much they make per 1000 impressions and calibrate the CPCs towards balanced equilibrium that will extract the most money out of the ad buyers. Publishers deal with visits and they need to know how much they make per visit.
I made my initial comment just to see where crybabies will go with their nonsense and couch expertise. Response as expected...
But don't let your clear picture of ad spending make you ignore the fundamental fact: there's no basic relation between ad views and advertising spending. More buzzfeeds mean that there will be more ads, but not more advertising dollars, and quality/expensive sites suffer just as heavily from the ad inflation driven by cheap content sites as they suffer from the 20-30% of people using ad blockers.