Pay for placement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pay for placement, or P4P, is an advertising model in which advertisements appear along with relevant search results in a Web search engine. Under this model, advertisers bid for the right to present an advertisement with specific search terms in an open auction^[1]. When someone enters one of these keywords into the search engine, the results of the auction on that search keyword are presented, ranked from highest bid to lowest.

When first introduced there was controversy because 70% of web users were unaware that results could be skewed as a result of such agreements^[2] which in some cases led to legal action^[3]. Many felt that the results would be irrelevant, but the auction model has proven to be effective at producing relevant results for searches where one wants to buy something.^{[citation needed]} P4P is now seen as the most efficient and effective way to monetize search engines.^{[citation needed]}