Publishers say they can't make money selling ads on a click basis; click rate can be as low as 2% on some sites. P&G and its interactive buying agency, Grey Advertising, New York, say that if Web users simply see an ad, that's not good enough. It must be clicked for the ad to really work.
Yahoo, for its part, declined to comment on terms of its deal with P&G. But industry executives had said Yahoo had agreed to P&G's terms with one condition: that it be allowed to help create the ads so as to maximize the click rate.