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As COO of NuCaptcha, Ron is a key member of the executive management team. Prior to NuCaptcha, Ron was a co-founder of Relic Entertainment (sold to THQ in 2004) and CEO/co-founder of Sitemasher, which was sold to Salesforce in 2010. Ron's passion and experience are centered on building innovative software products and then taking them to market.

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Captcha Advertising Is Catching On

Written on
May 2, 2011 
Author
Ron Moravek  |
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Captcha Advertising Is Catching On

captcha_smallADOTAS – As interactive marketers look for more engaged and “integrated” advertising mediums, Captachas are emerging as a valuable new tool. Here are three things interactive marketers need to know about Captcha-based advertising:

1. You can use Captchas in many different ways to drive engagement.

Interactive video: Advertisers with existing IAB video assets can turn them into video-based captcha assets for a better engagement tool right where and when users are paying attention. These placements yield a 10x brand recall, as Captcha is one of the most powerful interactions offering a brand 100% share of voice and a guaranteed engagement. (My company NuCaptcha offers this type of technology.)

Mailers and email letters: Marketers are always fighting spammers and fraudulent signups to their lists, causing an ongoing battle with ISPs to stay in the inbox. By employing Captcha on registration pages, you can ensure only humans are signing up with real email addresses , which in return gives you a highly responsive mailing list.

“Gateway” advertisements: Ensure engagement anywhere on the page. For newspapers and publishers wanting to drive new revenues, Captcha yields a CPM that’s four times the average for an interstitial, which means you could serve it a quarter of the time, generate the same revenue and create an uninterrupted experience for users. Your readers will no longer skip right past these – as Captcha provides a guaranteed engagement for brands.

Drive new “fans”: It’s easy to incorporate Captcha advertising into social strategies to juice up fan acquisition programs.

2. A Captcha protects your site against spam.

While you may not always need a security-enabled Captcha for all applications, security is essential when it is needed. Why? If you want to convince your IT or Web security folks into changing all the Captchas on your site into the next great revenue generation tool, you better have a good answer for security.

As a marketer, you need to understand the different types of advertising Captchas currently on the market: There are ad units (provided by companies such as Solve Media, which serve the same images and are easy to solve); mid-security Captchas (typically used in forms, blogs, etc); and high-security Captchas (for authentication, transactions, etc).

The majority of Captcha uses on the Web today require the latter — the highest difficulty in solving for intruders. If existing Captchas are there to protect against spambots, human farms, etc., they must continue provide this function, and ideally improve on it.

One of the easiest ways to tell whether a Captcha offers any real security is to simply look at the image needing to be typed in. Is it constantly changing or static? If the image doesn’t change, it can be immediately cracked by a spam bot, and is not an option for both security and revenue generation combined.

3. Not all Captcha technology is created equally.

The Captcha market is massive, yet, a large majority of sites still rely on ReCaptcha’s 10-year-old technology for security, despite limited functionality and annoying its users. There’s a tremendous opportunity for marketers to adopt newer, video-based technology that is easier to read and offers ad-serving capabilities – along with better security.

If marketers and advertisers want to see this medium open up to the broader market, they must go beyond the immediate low-hanging fruit of revenue generation, and embrace truly secure technologies that can replace what’s already “good enough.” Make sure you understand where and how you want to use your Captcha technology before picking a provider; if you need options that go beyond advertising and include security with an SLA, you need to pick a Captcha platform that explicitly does this.





Reader Comments.

we setup our SweetCaptcha service bec’ :
1. we hate the current CAPTCHA.
2. It doesnt have any design .
3. you can make it work on mobile and iPads.

so SweetCaptcha.com – we hope you like it too.
here is a WP link too :
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service/

Posted by Ari | 2:43 pm on May 3, 2011.

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