There are estimates that by the year 2000, over $2 billion a year will be spent on Internet advertising. The still unanswered question is: "Is this money worth spending?" How and where it is being spent is a bit easier to answer.

Most of the money spent on Internet advertising so far seems to be on company sponsored Web pages. Studies indicate that the cost per reader is higher for Internet Web pages then for print, radio or TV advertisements. What advertisers are hoping is that the added level of information provided by these sites will move more people to buy product.

The Internet is an amazing way to advertise. With current technology on-line brochures involve not only text and pictures but sound and video. The production costs are on a par with conventional multi media production but the delivery costs are low. Not only that but because it is up to the potential customer to demand, via their Internet connection, the information it will be seen by people who are known to be interested in the product. Consumers can view as little or as much of the information as they want and only that much information is transmitted.

Costly as Web sites are, they may prove to be less costly then mailing hard copy materials if they can attract enough readers. Getting people to browse a Web site is the second biggest form of advertising. Many companies are adding Web pointers to print and television advertisements as ell as buying pointer space on other sites to attract readers to their hypertext WWW brochures.

Many sites are now peddling their "location" as valuable sites for advertising. These sites attract browsers based on content or features. Sites like Yahoo which provides arguably the Web's best directory attract millions of hits a day. News sites like CNN also attract many browsers. These have become prime sites for paid advertising. Digital Equipment has attracted a great many browsers with its Alta Vista search engine. They only advertise their own company and products but this may signal a trend for the future where companies create one attraction site based on a service and use it to draw people to other more sales related sites.

The big question, especially for sites that sell advertising and the companies who buy it is, how many people actually notice enough or are interested enough to push the link for more information? Software to track this is starting to come on the market and will be critical to the success of this form of advertisement.

Advertising dollars are well spent if the advertisement is noticed and results in profitable sales. If the Internet continues to grow, as advertisers hope and the pundits predict, then the cost per reader will balance out. As people get more accustomed to finding their product information on the Web more readers will seek out advertising sites. In the mean time valuable lessons are being learned in Web design and using a new medium. In theory anyway.

This essay was published as a feature article in Internet-on-a-Disk #17 from The B&R Samizdat Express.

Copyright Alfred C Thompson II 2007