There are many names given to various processes and businesses that do not make sense, but out of all of them pay per click advertising has got to be the strangest-at least, for the non-internet savvy. To those familiar with the inner workings of the world wide web pay per click advertising makes perfect sense.

Here is a thought. Running a site on the web takes money, in particular if you are an enormously popular search engine. There are fees and costs for everything from the domain to the staff that keeps the 24 hour a day process running and keeps the website in the lead on technology and features, and to maintain a smooth flow of operations

Just because you are this great search engine, there isn't someone waiting to pay the bills for you. There are no freebees.

Well, how are you going to get the money to pay the bills and stay in business? You are busy all the time hooking searchers up with the places they want to go. That is full-time work by itself.

Then it occurs to you. Every day hundreds upon thousands of people come to see you. They see everything that is printed upon your pages. What if you offered to let advertisers take advantage of that fact and use you to advertise their products? They gain much needed exposure and you can charge them as much as you like for the service because they are not going to get this opportunity anyplace else.

One problem stands in your way. There are way more people searching on the internet than there are reading newsprint ads and seeing television ads.

Doesn't seem right if you charge them the same way as tv and newspaper's do. That is how you come to dream up pay-per-click as your answer.

Consider this. The greater the quantity of people visiting a website the more profit the business owner in question is going to make.

This is a great opportunity for you. If you charge the advertiser a small fee, maybe $0.05 or $0.10 each time a surfer comes through on the web and chooses their advertisement and clicks on it, even if the surfer doesn't buy anything, your advertiser is not going to complain.

They inevitably recoup the fee you charge them through the growth of their profit margin; however, you know the fickleness of web browsers and how they like to click on these advertisements for no apparent reason.

You decide to help these internet marketers by allowing them to decide when they feel that they have paid enough for your services; they can say that after their advertisement has received so many hits they want you to stop running it in order to decrease the potential expenses. That way if one surfer decides to be obnoxious and simply continues clicking on their ad you are not draining their advertising budget dry.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pay per click advertising.