Pay-per-action Model for Online Advertising

The online advertising industry is currently based on two dominant business models: the pay-per-impression model and the payper-click model. With the growth of sponsored search during the last few years, there has been a move toward the pay-per-click model as it decreases the risk to small advertisers. An alternative model, discussed but not widely used in the advertising industry, is pay-per-conversion, or more generally, pay-per-action. In this paper, we discuss various challenges involved in designing mechanisms for the pay-per-action model, and approaches to tackle some of them.