Robert Hamilton

The prospect of Web browsers that automatically strip out advertising banners probably seems quite appealing to lots of Internet users. All too often, banners are dull and uninspiring, adding nothing more than delays to consumers’ time online.

It is tempting to think that, as bandwidth increases, any irritation caused by the slow download times of Web advertising will go away. But in reality, developers are likely to add more and more features to banners, thus ensuring that their “take” of bandwidth remains relatively constant.

Rumours abound of ways to skip banners. However, anyone who develops such a program will face a battle similar to that fought by Symantec and other anti-virus developers – as one form of banner is stopped, advertisers and developers will simply invent another.

Commercial activity on the Internet is not the focus for hatred it once was. I suspect that this is because even die-hard Netizens accept that the corporate rush towards online services has brought better software, improved Net infrastructure and started the development of rich interactive content.

But so long as the marginal cost of visiting one Website over another remains almost nil, marketers must accept consumers’ desire for control and give them what they want.

Once micro-transactions allow small payments to be made ( la CompuServe – it did get something right), we might see two rates for access to sites: a cheap rate with advertising, and a premium rate that’s ad free.

Some cable channels already operate purely on subscription revenue, and there’s no reason why parts of the Web will not go the same way. If marketing on the Net is to be effective, it will have to give consumers something desirable, such as entertainment or information, or genuinely subsidise access.

Andrew Curry at Videotron has said that today’s interactive TV is best compared with the TV of the Fifties. I’m inclined to believe that Internet marketing is in a very similar position.

In more developed fields, everyone is clamouring for new ideas, searching for the 0.1 per cent that hasn’t been tried yet. In new media it’s the 99.9 per cent that remains untried and unknown.

There’s still a lot to be learned about the effectiveness of banners, and some traditional media rules will have to be jettisoned before we can move forward. Banners are necessary, but as more sophisticated ways of selling evolve, they will be just one of the many ways to promote products and services on the Net.