Internet Advertising
Essay Preview: Internet Advertising
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Advertising can mean many different things in today’s world. When advertising first was developed it was done by would of mouth and the classic flyer or poster. Then it moved up to using the radio to help capture a bigger audience. After that it moved towards the television where an even bigger audience could be reached. Lastly companies started to realize the shear amount of traffic that was generated by the Internet.
The Internet first started to get popular in the mid 1990’s. Where only people with high tech computers and that could afford the service had the Internet. Of course the Internet did not look the way it does now during that time. There were no pop up ads, java, banners, or graphics that made a consumer purchase a product because they saw it on the Internet. One main reason that there was none of this was because the Internet could only use dial — up. Of course everyone knows how slowly that was, so picture trying to upload or update a website at that pace with huge files. We all know that this would take a very long time eventually making the company lose money. With the turn of the century close by not only did we enter a new century but we entered a new age of the Internet. The introduction of a cable modem drastically increased the Internet population. With speeds up to almost one hundred times faster then dial — up there was no comparison. With this new invention companies soon started to ease off on some parts of their advertising campaign and focused more on advertising on the Internet.
There are many different ways to advertise on the Internet. One of the biggest and probably most annoying to some would be the good old fashion pop up ad. These ads literally pop up out of nowhere and appear over the screen you are trying to view. Some sites might even have three or four of them all pop at once. Although these may seem annoying to Internet users, these pop up ads are very effective because the user does not have a choice to not view them. In a way they are forced upon the user. With that quick ten to twenty second window that company has gained, over time that can add up to a lot of people seeing that add. With today’s traffic through the Internet just imagine how many people would see a pop up ad in a week! Another key component to pop up ads is that they often include interactive games of sort to try and make the users keep the window open longer. Host sites love having pop up ads on their sites because they are only there for as long as the user wants them to be an open screen. Plus the host site charges the advertising company to allow the pop ups to happen and to the host site’s benefit the ad again is only up there for as long as the internet user wants it up. Therefore it doesn’t take up space on the site, which leaves more room for the host site. One negative thing about using pop up ads is that some Internet users got fed up with all these pop up ads, so some search engines such as Google or Yahoo have included a pop up blocker on their toolbars. This literally blocks pop up ads from popping up on a user’s screen. To some point this hurts the advertising companies from using pop up ads but from this the companies were able to research and develop different ways to advertise effectively to reach their targeted customer.
An additional way companies advertise on the Internet is with the use of banners. A banner is basically a rectangular shaped ad at the top or bottom of a web page. These usually are put in as a link, so a user can click on them and the link would take them to that product that was being advertised. Overall a banner is very effective because they stay on the website the entire time the user is on it and if the user really wants to view all they have to do is click on it. Because the banner is not bugging the user, the banners are sometimes clicked on based on curiosity. Usually a banner is sold by the pixel, which is a unit of area on a computer screen. Because this size can vary vastly, some say that a banner is the simplest way to advertise on the Internet. One main component about a banner is the colors used in it. As an advertising company you would want your banner to have colors that stood out and were easy to read. As a company you would not want to spend thousands of dollars on one banner just to have two or three colors clash and that causes the banner to be hard to read. (
A college student was surfing the web and he realized how the banners worked and how they sold by the pixel. He came up with this brilliant idea to maximize the computer screen and make it one thousand by one thousand pixels. With this he sold every pixel for one Dollar and came up with the appropriate named website, milliondollarhomepage.com. One thousand times one thousand equal one million dollars. This college student filled his host site to the brim and made himself a real one million dollars to help pay for his college career. (www.milliondollarhomepage.com) To some this sounds ridiculous but to some it sounds scary because it can be that easy to make huge amounts of money on the Internet with barely any work.
Back to another type of advertising found on the internet is spyware. To many this may be a very controversy subject. Spyware is basically a pop up ad or link that a user will click, but soon after the link or ad will start to take up space in your personal computers memory and space. The tricky part is that it is really hard to determine if an ad is spyware or not. Once you click that ad or download a program, it could be history for your computer. Spyware can totally destroy a user’s computer and cause him or her to consult a system restore. Luckily there are programs which are used to remove spyware from a user’s computer. One program that I know that loves to produce