Of course it had to happen. Not only is NCSA one of the best places to advertise (its pages are some of the most heavily travelled) but the public funding for its massive effort has been threatened to be cut off or reduced. Whether this leads to other US Government (or any other government for that matter) agencies going after advertising dollars, only time will tell, but I think it is a natural.
The whole concept of the Internet as a public entertainment/information medium puts it on par with the other three traditional advertising supported media: newspapers, radio, and television. Why shouldn't it attract advertisers to the more heavily traveled parts?
There are large numbers of the sites on the WWW that want business to contract with them to create a "point of presence" on the Web, and many businesses do just that. The problem with most of these sites is that they have little to attract viewers to them other than the list of their clients. This is kind of like taking the "Yellow Pages"(tm) and breaking it up into several hundred different books, all dealing with only a small number of businesses, and each of which you have to search before you find what you are looking for. Not what most people will bother with.
What will make the difference, and what is making the difference, is the interesting content that many sites on the Internet provide. Adding this to pointers to the business listings and individual business points of presence makes the whole idea of the Internet as an advertising medium complete. A whole industry is being built on the provision of interesting interactive and passive Internet content, just so that there is a place for advertisers to advertise.
Some of the content is coming from the traditional media, converted to fit the WWW format, albeit sometimes pretty badly. Some of it has been around for a long time (long on the WWW is measured in months by the way) and is only just being recognized as prime ground for commercialism - the above mentioned NCSA What's New page being a wonderful example.
Some of the content is truly new and different from anything in the traditional media. Publications like NWHQ and ANIMA are examples of this different new medium taken to some pretty fantastic heights. Others, such as The Round Robin Storybook have absoulutely no parallel in any other medium, since they are built around the interactive nature of the Internet. The amount of attention these and other such interesting Web sites are garnering make them wonderful examples of what can be done with the tools available. And if these can be done in a relatively non-commercial portion of the Web, think what could be done with the incentive provided by the massive amounts of advertising revenues that can be projected.
As I noted in an older article on The Shift in the Driving Force for the Consumer the fact that the Internet has facility for immdediate feedback to advertisers and content providers will drive those advertisers and providers to create a far more diverse and far higher quality use of this new medium than is currently made of any of the traditional ones. The fact that viewers may comment and converse not only with the creators, but with anyone else (and indeed everyone else) who is interested in a particular subject will spread the good word about good things as well as the bad word about bad things in a much more thourough fashion than ever before.
No longer will the editor of the local News-Web site be able (or forced because of limited printing ability) to pick and choose which letters-to-the-editor they will publish, the public will publish them themselves in the relevant news group. The consumer will not only not re-visit sites they consider low quality, they will provide immediate (and sometimes nasty) comment on why they made such a decision; and in some cases will even say what they think should be done about it.
This will be like having a massive editorial board or production team ready and willing to point out the mistakes, bad assumptions and logic flaws, as well as give praise when/where it is due. The actual editor/producer will have to be careful to stick within their defined objectives with all of this comment available.
Advertisers will have hard choices to make in the initial period of development of the Web. The growth and development of this medium over the past year has been staggering, and the next months and years will see even more changes, not only in the paradigms various Web sites use, but in the quality and quantity of offerings. In order to maximize their exposure, advertisers will "vote with their dollars" and support what they think will be high traffic sites. Others will choose sites which fit into their own concept of propriety and content. Still others will be adventurous and support new ideas and offerings.
The opportunity for new ventures and publications in this area are limitless. I have seen one estimate of the number of people on the Internet by 2000 as 300 million (Vint Cerf in Wired, Dec 1994), and just based upon the past historical trend, I think this is conservative.
Along with the new content will come business looking to ride along to those millions of viewers as they surf from place to place. The future of the Web will be shaped by how and where they spend their advertising dollars. I just hope that the balance between the consumer feedback and the advertiser's spending power will give us things that approach the potential shown in some of today's freely given offerings.
Richard Pitt
richard@wimsey.com
admin@wimsey.com