We’ve all encountered the human verification tool, CAPTCHA. An amazing 300 million of them are completed every day on the internet. They take an average 14-seconds to complete, and raise your blood pressure a few degrees as you struggle to decipher the impossibly scrambled letters and numbers. As annoying as these are they are a necessary evil in this spam-filled world – and accounting for 130 years of human attention every single day, there has to be a better use for this space?
That’s the thinking behind work at Future Labs and other smart developers, who’ve come up with idea to combine the two – creating a playful interactive experience called PlayCAPTCHA that delivers a brand message at the same time as verifying you are human. Studies have shown that this kind of interaction has a 1200% better message recall than a standard banner ad – and banner ads are a failure anyway as according to an Infolinks study earlier this year 60% of people can’t remember the last disp
lay ad they saw just moments later. Instead, PlayCAPTCHA turns a frustrating activity for the user into something that is fun and a lot easier than deciphering a bunch of mixed letters. Find out more about how you, as an advertiser, can benefit on the Future Labs website. If you’re a website owner without a brand message to push you could earn more advertising clicks if you sign up to use a PlayCAPTCHA instead of a regular one. The standard 468×60 banner ad has a 0.04% click-through rate anyway, which means your visitors are more likely to drown in the bath than click on a banner ad – which is hardly a good way to earn money.
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