Advertising has a poor reputation in many quarters because most advertising is designed for a broad market. But in the one-to-one world the Net promises, advertising will often be tailored and of higher quality. Those with more money to spend will get higher-quality advertising.
Third parties might compile movie ratings or restaurant reviews and make them available. Eventually advertising would become obsolete. “When you have self-promotion, you have biased information, low-grade information.”
Prohibiting the posting of e-mail advertisements into newsgroups with assigned topics under discussion would seem reasonable, because such inundation is disruptive, intrusive, and surely an invasion of the sanctity that the Supreme Court purportedly protected in Rowan v. United States Post Office Department … Prohibiting the delivery of commercial messages to e-mail destinations would seem consistent with the First Amendment’s goal of encouraging a diversity of information sources without intruding upon the sanctity of personal e-mail or autonomous-group cyberspaces.
We want that advertising, but we want it at the time and place of our choosing.
The information highway will be able to sort consumers according to much finer distinctions [than today’s television and print publications], and to deliver (to) each a different stream of advertising … Data can be gathered and disseminated without violating anyone’s privacy because the interactive network will be able to use information about consumers to route advertising without revealing which specific households received it … Some of the billions of dollars now spent annually on media advertising, and on the printing and postage of direct-mail advertising, will instead be divvied up among consumers who agree to watch or read ads sent directly to them as messages.
Paid advertising will save the Internet in two ways: First, advertising will make the Internet sustainably inexpensive, like today’s newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio – a prospect that should excite universal-access advocates. Second, advertising will provide practical incentives for attracting the attention of Internet citizens to the information they need. The fact is, the Internet is now large and rapidly outgrowing its quaint netiquette. The Internet is running up against new limits – not on computing power, not on bandwidth, but on the attention span of its citizens.
Advertisers only invest the big bucks in measured media, where they can have some inkling of how many potential buyers with what demographics are reading their ads. Even if, as Nielsen just reported, 37 million North Americans tried the Internet in the last three months, we’ll discover in 1996 that the vast majority surfed for several hours and then went back to watching TV. After the third major corporation stuffs its Web pages full of dazzling product literature and gets no hits, the Internet’s collapse will begin to accelerate.
In the future, advertisers may also spread the word by subsidizing people’s Net usage. They may say, “Look at our ads in e-mail and we’ll give you an hour’s free online time.”
Don’t worry that there may not be enough advertising opportunities on the Internet itself to get people to come to your site, though even this is changing rapidly, just look out to all the other medias that are available and use those to drive people to your site.
Instead of deciding what we want and when, advertising companies, their corporate clients, and big computer systems will be figuring it out for us … Subject to endless pitches, we will be identified by our consumer habits, immediately conscious of being encouraged to consume by people who seem to know us better than our friends.