“CPC” has been pounded into our brains to mean “Cost per Click”, an advertising format that charges the advertiser a cash amount only if someone actively clicks on an advert, typically a link.

Advertisers buy the right to show an advert for a given word or set of words. So in essence an economy of words exists that as we know Google, Yahoo, MS and dozens of other advert networks have proven to be very lucrative.

I have been giving some thought lately to the notion of moving beyond charging for words and actually charging for characters. Is there a similar marketplace that could be developed driven by purchasing a collection of characters (I know it’s a word) and pricing characters?

A fascination with characters seems to be prominent these days with services like Twitter limiting your character participation to 140 or less per post, other social networks letting you post short snips as often as you like and of course URL shortening services trying to shrink traditional http url paths to an invisible size.

Well muckrack.com beat me to the “Cost per Character” dream. In what I believe is a simple and genius service, they have created a community of journo’s on Twitter and are offering anyone the chance to post a press release with a “Cost per Character” model.

It is one dollar per character. That’s it.

You write, you pay, paypal takes a 3% cut and muckrack keeps the rest.

Now there is a $50 buck minimum, which kind of defeats the purpose in my opinion, but you have to start somewhere and I hope over time they will get it down to a true cost per character model. Imagine all the BS press releases that would be trimmed down!