Hasta La Creative!

Financial Times is a staid publication for the people in the front part of airplanes, but the London-based newspaper is embracing — and today making official — a radical way of selling digital advertising: by time spent, not the decades-old model of impressions.

With this new approach, called cost-per-hour, or CPH, Financial Times seeks to charge some advertisers by the number of hours their ads appear in front of certain segments of readers. The vast majority of publishers charge advertisers a rate called the CPM, for the cost per thousand people that are served an ad.

Financial Times executives refer to their cost-per-hour units as “long-form ads,” because advertisers are only charged when at least 50% of an ad appears on screen for more than five seconds of “active” time — meaning they’re engaged with the screen and have not, say, left their browsers open and gone for coffee. Chartbeat is working with Financial Times to measure all of this.

Continue reading at AdAge.com