Search Engine Advertising Marketing 1-818-501-3646

Introduction to Internet Advertising

---

We are constantly bombarded with mass media advertisements in daily life. Recently, the internet has become the new venue through which such advertisements can reach viewers. Both through pop-up ads, banners and the mere visitation of a website, companies have begun to advertise their products through the World Wide Web.

Many believe that Internet Advertising is the key to the new generation of business. Others, however, contend that internet advertising does little to impact a consumer's mind. Regardless of which side you believe, it is clear that many major businesses are beginning e-Marketing campaigns and that it is a growing source of advertisement for such businesses. Apple has been giving away iPods through the "special offers" of other companies. Other companies use pop-up ads (Orbitz.com) to lure in the potential consumer. Although the method may be different from company to company, e-Advertising is definitely becoming more and more popular.

This website details the various parts of my research regarding internet advertising. Whether you would like to see a brief history of internet advertising over the years, or you would like to see what my hypothesis and conclusion are, you may click the links on the side of our website and go to a page that will show you. I hope you enjoy the website

Summary of Research Findings

---

Note: Since the Overview page includes most of the statistics from the research, this page will merely summarize my research findings. It will not provide statistics, but rather reiterate the arguments that scholars use in favor of my hypothesis.

Many scholars continue to argue that internet advertising can be effective for companies to improve their recognizability in consumers. Orbitz.com, for example, has consistently used sites such as ESPN.com to bombard surfers with advertisements for flight promotions [9]. Other companies such as Classmates.com have largely increased their popularity by utilizing banner ads at a large number of high traffic websites. Yahoo! and Google, the world's most popular search engines, utilize advertisements as a source of revenue for their websites. Scholars believe that their success clearly depends on the income from internet advertisements. Few scholars disagree with one fact: companies can get their name out to the public by harassing surfers with pop-up, banner, and e-mail advertisements.

Skeptics, however, argue that most surfers gloss over the advertisements on the internet. Unlike TV and Radio, where the individual is forced to watch or listen to the ads in order to continue with regular programming, internet does not provide such a captive audience. Instead, the internet is a place where individuals usually have specific goals in mind: surfers know what they are looking for from a website and rarely spend time idly glancing at banner ads or pop-ups [3]. Furthermore, the high volume of pop-up and banner advertisements creates a sense of frustration with companies that surfers continually see on their computer screens. Many scholars go so far as to say that sometimes, if improperly implemented, internet advertising can backfire on a company because it annoys potential consumers. In particular, click-through rates are extremely low; some researchers believe they are well below 1%

Overview of Internet Advertising

History of Internet Advertising

Advertising on the Internet quickly followed the introduction of the World Wide Web. Introduced in 1991 by CERN in Switzerland, the World Wide Web (to which most people refer to as the "internet") provided an easy-access forum for companies to market their products. Soon, the online advertising began to boom. By 2001, top companies like Microsoft, Yahoo!, Amazon and American Online managed to reach between 125 to 442 million viewers. It soon became clear that internet advertising was no joke, and the number of viewers and dollars continues to grow exponentially [8].

Interesting Facts [2, 4, 6]:

• The "internet" does not really refer to the World Wide Web; it includes all forms of communication via network channels.
• The origin of internet advertising is largely unknown
• Internet advertising accounts for 2% of all advertising spending in the economy today.
• ClassMates.com reaches the largest audience via banner ads at 12.16%
• The average web user has 6 web sessions per week, but the click rate for top banners is only 0.31
• The top advertising domain is yahoo.com, which reaches 32.34% of all internet users

---

Modern Internet Advertising
Internet advertising has become the norm for most big and small companies. It is extremely rare in today's economy for a large firm to have a marketing department that does not include an e-Advertising group. In fact, special internet advertising analysts and research teams are being hired and created at most major companies. Sites such as Yahoo.com, Google.com, MSN.com and other search engines make billions of dollars in revenue due to internet advertising even though the websites are free for visitors [6]. Nonetheless, internet advertising still does not account for a large part of the advertising budgets of companies. This is partly due to the economic nature of internet advertisements. Since the ability for the internet to display messages is infinite, most ads are extremely cheap in comparison to more expensive TV, magazine or radio advertisements. Such advertisements come in all forms and sizes. The following is a table with a description of the major types

Forms of Internet Advertising

Type of Ad
Description

E-mail
E-mail ads can either be based on subscription to a website or via spamming (see Illegal vs. Legal).

Banner
Banner ads span a portion of the website. The goal is for users to click on the ad and go to the advertiser's site.

Spyware
Spyware is an illegal form of advertising used to hack into a user's computer and supply advertisements via the host.

Pop-Up
Pop-up ads create a new browser window upon entry of a website. The goal is for the user to click on the ad.

Contextual
Contextual ads are ones that are within the host website.

---

Illegal vs. Legal Internet Advertising
Legal advertising involves any form of advertising that involves search engines, an advertising network or a volunteer-based e-mail advertising. Search engine advertising refers to preferred websites provide based on certain searches. For example, it is legal for google.com to have "suggested websites" (usually the host has paid to be a "suggested website") at the top of your search results. Advertising networks include banner, pop-up and contextual advertising. All of these forms of advertising require permission from the host website (and usually some sort of fee) to allow an advertisement (including the appropriate link) to be embedded within the website. Companies often pay per pixel or per click-through. This is the most common form of advertising. Finally, when someone voluntarily signs up for an e-mail list on a website, it is legal to e-mail them with offers and promotions from that website. It is only legal, however, to e-mail those surfers based on the agreement provided on the website when they signed on the list

Illegal advertising includes all forms of spamming, which is defined as "the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail" (Wikipedia). Unsolicited e-mail includes any messages sent electronically that were not asked for by the recipient. Bulk e-mails implies that the message must be sent to multiple unsolicited recipients in order to qualify as "spam." There are many ways for spam to be transferred other than e-mail, such as instant messaging, blogs and mobile phone; however, e-mail is the most common. A large number of companies find spamming useful due to the cheap cost of entry. It costs almost nothing for companies to spam millions of user's inboxes with e-mails. However, most big companies do not want to risk associating themselves with spam e-mails due to the high chance of being prosecuted. Spam is illegal and there is a high penalty for using it to reach potential customers