Seth Godin posted a couple of thought-provoking blog posts recently about online ads: Ads are the new online tip jar and a follow-up, Beating the status quo.

What Godin proposes is, when you read a blog, “if you like what you’re reading, click an ad to say thanks.” If everybody engaged in this behavior, it would over time change the model of online advertising so that ads would pull in more people but they would be less well qualified.

He writes that your landing page gives you the opportunity to “immerse someone in an entire page you designed. In other words, a chance to convert mild interest into big interest.”

This is the part that is particularly interesting to me. The idea of landing pages (at least at this time) is it fulfills the promise made in the ad the user just clicked on. The ad is meant to pull in only people that are interested in learning more. The landing page, in turn, is meant to speak to people who found the ad interesting and want to learn more about the product that was advertised or finding a solution to a problem they experience. Godin’s vision entails people clicking on ads that they don’t actually care about.

We would be challenged to put together landing pages that speak to the casual visitor. We would have to grab the attention of these less-motivated visitors immediately to keep them from leaving. When talking about the product or service, different messages will appeal to different people, but the more messages you try to pack into a landing page, the harder it will be to get through to visitors.

The answer, then, may be to try to suck in visitors through content that is entertaining instead of presenting a purely informative page. Will that strategy work for every business, though? Perhaps the answer lies in crafting the message on a landing page to clearly and loudly tell visitors why this landing page is worth their time.

Godin’s idea intrigues me but I am not convinced. He proposes that the value of this new model to advertisers would be “begin[ning] to reach the unreachable non-clickers.” It will be hard to reach visitors whose motive for clicking on an ad is not to learn more about what you are advertising, but rather to generate income for the blogger whose work they enjoy.