Financial Times Sells ‘Long-Form’ Digital Display Ads

Advertising Age: The Financial Times is embracing 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, the London-based newspaper seeks to charge some advertisers by the number of hours their ads appear in front of certain segments of readers. FT execs 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.