The advertising landscape is not only in flux but has already been permanently altered as a result of search engines' use of pay-for-performance (PFP) advertising, according to a just-released study from InfoCommerce Group titled "Online Buying Guides: Making Sense of What's Happening Now." The study found that advertisers are not excited by PFP per se but by one of its main manifestations - shifting risk from the advertiser to the publisher - and consider PFP "more fair."

The study points to a disconnect between how publishers are selling themselves and what advertisers consider valuable. The majority of advertisers (71 percent) consider publisher-generated performance reporting important, but the same percentage of publishers (71 percent) delivers no advertiser reporting.

Rather than stress the quality of their audiences, which advertisers are willing to consider, 62 percent of publishers continue to sell on the basis of their overall site traffic - although vertical B2B sites tend not to generate huge amounts of traffic.

The study found that only four percent of buying guide publishers offer a PFP option.