It's usually against search engine terms & conditions to promote their ads with any kind of incentive designed to encourage or force people to click on them. The reason for this is straightforward - advertisers don't want floods of worthless traffic. They want people to click on their ads with a serious intention to buy. Any system that doesn't respect this principle probably won't be in business long because their advertisers will soon quit.
Having said that, here are a couple of high profile sites who are sailing very close to the wind.
Alex Tew - The man behind the milliondollarpixel homepage is back with pixelotto. A spin on the original concept, fill a million pixels with a twist. This time a visitor has the chance to win $1,000,000.
HOW IT WORKS!Once all the pixels have been filled Alex is giving half of his revenue back as a prize. As a consumer you can signup for free, you get 10 clicks per day, the more days you play, the more chances you will have. A month after all the ad space is sold, one ad is selected at random and a winner is chosen from all those people who clicked that ad. You have to give $100,000 to charity!. Advertisers cannot win the prize.
Now with Alex, the advertisers know what they are getting into and he is not in breech of any T&C's.
Clicknow.org.uk pitch themselves as a charity based search engine. The model can be summed up as a paid search cashback site!
HOW IT WORKS!A charity is assigned their very own search landing page. On that page, Clicknow show both organic and sponsored listings, with more sponsored ads where possible. When a user clicks on a sponsored listing, at no cost to themselves, a % of the click is given to the charity and clicknow cash the rest.
It's unclear how Clicknow is getting around the forced click issue as they are showing listings from Ask.co.uk. Revenues from this operation are substantial - the Dogs Trust, for example, have made more than £10,000. I'd estimate that's at least 50,000 clicks that have gone through to advertisers. The question is
how many of these forced clicks resulted in sales???
