Cost per
click. Yet another
TLA that
dot com execs and
telemarketers will patiently explain the benefits of to you at any time of day.
Say you are the webmaster of a site that sells jewelry. You make an agreement with cpc.com to pay them $0.25 CPC, and they agree to list you on their site. For every visitor they bring to your site, you pay them a quarter. If they bring you 1000 visitors, you owe them $250.
It's good to track your dollars per visitor and send your cpc.com traffic to a redirect so you can track for yourself how many unique visitors you are getting.
As a webmaster, I have been getting ludicrous amounts of these calls lately. Apparently, a bunch of pre-IPO internet portals got the same idea at the same time and it's a race to call everyone in the Network Solutions directory.
I've found it to be a waste of time, especially over a dime CPC. Some places want more than a quarter. After crunching the numbers I figured that, eyeballs aside, they need to be sending better than average customers to you. They've got to be drooling for warez when they get to you, their credit cards next to the mouse, because you just paid someone to send them there.
The real kicker of this scheme is that you never know what the bill is going to be at the end of the month. You might get your second or third bill and it's half of your sales receipts.
Recently, on a promenent idealab! company that sells this product, I saw that amazon.com was trying to get the entire human language dictionary wrapped up and branded, Amazon style. I submit this as proof that it's a great way to lose money.
Of course, they'll tell you that it's a win-win situation.