There’s an interesting guest post on TechCrunch called “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.” It misses on some points, but hits on others, such as:

“It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information.

Online advertising is something I’ve thought a lot about, but I don’t fully understand. I just don’t get why there is so much emphasis on cost-per-click. It would seem to me that most clicks on online ads are either accidental or because a site is using some sort of trickery. I rarely, if ever, click on an ad.

I realize that I’m hardly the average Internet user, but it seems to me that those perhaps not as savvy right now, will become more savvy as the Internet become ingrained in our culture, and those people will also stop clicking on ads.

Google search ads are an exception, that model makes sense to me because people are actively searching for links on which to click. Search in general seems to be the only thing that makes sense for a real cost-per-click model, and I think Twitter Search will be able to use that to great advantage as well.

But for something like a website with banner ads, what’s the point of clicking on an ad? Sure, sometimes you might see something worth clicking on, but it’s rare. I don’t understand why advertising online has moved away from the idea of brand recognition.

If a brand buys space on your site, they are buying recognition. Of course, this is cost-per-impression, but that model absolutely sucks compared to cost-per-click, and I’m just not sure why. If I see an ad for some product on a site I enjoy, when it comes time to buy something, I’m more likely to buy that product. That’s how it’s always worked, and I don’t see why advertisers shouldn’t still be paying for that. They pay for it on the sides of buses and soccer jerseys, and you can’t click on them.

Sure, the ability to click on an ad online is great, amazing even if it leads to a sale, but that should cost the advertisers a huge amount of money if that happens. It’s just icing on the cake — sweet, but there won’t be a lot of it.

I’m still not convinced that site/service sponsorships based on branding are not the way to go on the web. For example, our Digital Media part of VentureBeat is sponsored by Sun. Perhaps if you like our content, you’ll visit often and then remember Sun if you need something in the future. Of course, it needs to be clear with any blog sponsorship that the content is not influenced by it (either way), unless obviously marked as a sponsored post.

For blogs, RSS throws a kink into this idea. While there are ads in many RSS feeds now, they are an absolute joke. This is a problem as more and more people bypass sites to read content through RSS. But I think there are a few compelling opportunities here along the same lines.

First, you can have an RSS feed sponsored by some company for a huge amount of money. The idea is that the company sponsoring the RSS feed is doing so to bring it to you, the customer, for free. Now, something about RSS may have a change a bit to allow for better branding in such a scenario, because the advertiser needs to be known if it’s paying for that right. Maybe you have a logo on top of every feed item, or on the side, or surrounding the entire content like a frame.

Second, while most people hate the idea for obvious reasons, what if micro-payments became a part of web feeds? This has been talked about many times before, including by me over a year ago, but what if a user was willing to pay for a full feed of content to get it easier (in their feed reader, or on a mobile device), while bypassing the advertising on the site?

I’m not talking a lot of money, maybe $0.99 a month for the feed. Again, I know this will piss people off because it’s hard to move from something that’s free to something that’s paid, but on some levels it makes sense: You’re paying for convenience and to not be advertised to.

And there still would be a feed of content for those who don’t want to pay. Perhaps it would just be truncated, which would of course force a user to your site if they wanted to read the full article — and as such, would see the branded advertising. Truncated feeds are a touchy subject, I know, but this makes some sense to me.

I hated the idea when Amazon first started charging for blog feeds on the Kindle, but the more I think about it, the more I think they may be onto something. Micro-transactions are exploding on the web in a number of areas, and why shouldn’t blogs take advantage of that?

Of course, for it to work, pretty much all blogs would have to do it — or at least the big ones. Any even if that happened, we might see a rise in other sites that don’t charge for feeds. But that is why content remains king, if you have good content, I’d bet that people would be willing to pay for access to it.

Of course, you’d also have to worry about scrapper sites that simply republish your content then.

This is all tricky shit, and it’s quite likely that I’m not even thinking about some new form of web monetization that will come along and make this all moot. But with advertising struggling on the Internet, it just seems to me there is a way it can all work, and thrive. It has to, because if it does not, sites and services will have to close down, and the web will be a lot less great.