Last month a certain magazine about Maine featured a list of “things we love about Maine”. The list, of course, included a “thing” that ranks way up on the list of things I love about Maine. Billboards. Or, rather, the lack thereof, along our scenic highways and byways. It’s a truly wonderful thing, a state treasure we should cherish and protect. All you need to do is spend a little time “away” and you see just how good we have it.

The information superhighway, on the other hand, winds its way through an ever-thickening billboard jungle that is about to get thicker. To get a clear view of where the highway is going, let’s look in the rear view mirror and see where we’ve been.

In its infancy the Internet was a tool used mostly by academia, professors, scientists, and the government. Once the general public gained access, it wasn’t long before the All-American question was asked: “how can we make money off this thing?”

Several revenue models were “test-driven”. Some are still in use today, like the subscription model, where you pay a fee to gain access to information or content you desire, a bit like magazine subscriptions of the “days of yore”. Some models never made it, like the idea that people would pay a fee to use the internet, and from that fee website owners would receive compensation based on the number of hits generated by their websites.

The pervasive revenue model on the Internet today, is, of course, advertising. Where does Google make their money? Advertising. Sure, Google provides a “free” service (their search engine and other tools that consumers and investors are going “ga-ga” over), but to use the service you need to endure a certain level of being advertised to.

By the way, if you do a Google search for a service or product, what determines the results you see, and the order in which you see them? Is it the number of hits the product site receives, meaning of course that a lot of people use it, and therefore it must be good? Or, is the site at the top of the list because the company that makes the product or provides the service paid Google “the big bucks” to place their listing there? Being at the top of the list is very important, as most surfers won’t click through ten pages of links to winnow out what’s available.

And don’t think for a nanosecond that what you Google and where you go to find it goes unnoticed by ad agencies and marketers. Plus, the pervasive “never-met-a-virus-it-didn’t-like” Windows operating system welcomes little bugs that can report your web movements to advertisers that want to do you the favor or personalizing your pop-up ads to appeal to your individual penchants and predilections.

Do you think TiVo and other digital video recording services would be allowed to access network and cable content if there was an “automatically skip commercials” button on the remote? Hardly. Way-back-when, an enterprising programmer developed a plug-in for web browsers that prevented advertising images from being displayed. That guy was quickly silenced. It took Microsoft years of complaints from consumers to finally build a pop-up window blocker into Internet Exploder.

So, there’s obviously “mucho dinero” (Spanish for a lot of money) in web advertising. Microsoft, never one to ignore a potential revenue stream, recently announced a new initiative called “Microsoft Live” to give you more of the advertising you obviously want.

Better hold the rest for next week. You don’t want to read this on a full stomach.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski