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Online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and World Wide Web to deliver marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, blogs, Rich Media Ads, Social network advertising, interstitial ads, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam. Many of these types of ads are delivered by an Ad server.
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One major benefit of online advertising is the immediate publishing of information and content that is not limited by geography or time. To that end, the emerging area of interactive advertising presents fresh challenges for advertisers who have hitherto adopted an interruptive strategy.
Another benefit is the efficiency of advertiser's investment. Online advertising allows for the customization of advertisements, including content and posted websites. For example, AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdSense enable ads to be shown on relevant web pages or alongside search result
The internet has become an ongoing emerging source that tends to expand more and more. The growth of this particular media attracts the attention of advertisers as a more productive source to bring in consumers.
A clear advantage consumers have with online advertisement is the control they have over the item, choosing whether to check it out or not.[1]
Online advertisements may also offer various forms of animation. In its most common use, the term "online advertising" comprises all sorts of banner, e-mail, in-game, and keyword advertising, on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or Myspace has received increased relevance. Web-87related advertising has a variety of sites to publicize and reach a niche audience to focus its attention to a specific group. Research has proven that online advertising has given results and is a growing business revenue.[2] For the year 2012, Jupiter research predicted $34.5 billion in US online advertising spending.
The three most common ways in which online advertising is purchased are CPM, CPC, and CPA.
The use of online advertising has implications on the privacy and anonymity of users. If an advertising company has placed banners in two Web sites. Hosting the banner images on its servers and using third-party cookies, the advertising company is able to track the browsing of users across these two sites.
Third-party cookies can be blocked by most browsers to increase privacy and reduce tracking by advertising and tracking companies without negatively affecting the user's Web experience. Many advertising operators have an opt-out option to behavioral advertising, with a generic cookie in the browser stopping behavioral advertising.
There is also a class of advertising methods which are considered unethical and may even be illegal. These include external applications which alter system settings (such as a browser's home page), spawn pop-ups, and insert advertisements into non-affiliated webpages. Such applications are usually labelled as spyware or adware. They may mask their questionable activities by performing a simple service, such as displaying the weather or providing a search bar. These programs are designed to dupe the user, acting effectively as Trojan horses. These applications are commonly designed so as to be difficult to remove or uninstall. The ever-increasing audience of online users, many of whom are not computer-savvy, frequently lack the knowledge and technical ability to protect themselves from these programs.
Online advertising encompasses a range of types of advertising, some of which are deployed ethically and some are not. Some websites use large numbers of advertisements, including flashing banners that distract the user, and some have misleading images designed to look like error messages from the operating system, rather than advertisements. Websites that unethically use online advertising for revenue frequently do not monitor what advertisements on their website link to, allowing advertisements to lead to sites with malicious software or adult material. The ethical propriety of advertisers that use web searches for competitors' brands to trigger their own ads has been questioned. [6]
Website operators that ethically use online advertising typically use a small number of advertisements that are not intended to distract or irritate the user, and do not detract from the design and layout of their websites.[7] Many website owners deal directly with companies that want to place ads, meaning that the website linked to by the advertisement is legitimate.
The overuse of technologies like Adobe Flash in online advertising has led to some users disabling it in their browsers, or using browser plug-ins like Adblock or NoScript. Many sites use centralized advertising services whose advertisement may be blocked as a side effect of security and privacy measures, because the services require JavaScript and cross-site requests to function, while such features are often not necessary to use the sites and are a potential source of vulnerabilities.
Some companies perform customer engagement studies in online marketing to insure consumer satisfaction, through the use of online compliance centers, building and deploying fraud detection tools, while inspecting websites and publishers to insure website pages offer the highest degree of information security and compliancy with Can Spam Requirements.[8]
Though, as seen above, the large majority of online advertising has a cost that is brought about by usage or interaction of an ad, there are a few other methods of advertising online that only require a one time payment. The Million Dollar Homepage is a very successful example of this. Visitors were able to pay $1 per pixel of advertising space and their advert would remain on the homepage for as long as the website exists with no extra costs.
In addition, ads containing streaming video or streaming audio are becoming very popular with advertisers.
Legitimate Email advertising or E-mail marketing is often known as "opt-in e-mail advertising" to distinguish it from spam.
Display advertising appears on web pages in many forms, including web banners. These banners can consist of static or animated images, as well as interactive media that may include audio and video elements. Display advertising on the Internet is widely used for branding. This is why metrics like interaction time are becoming more relevant. This may change in the future as display advertising is becoming much more targeted to users, much like how search engine ads can be extremely relevant to users based on what they are searching for. Display advertisers use cookie and browser history to determine demographics and interests of users and target appropriate ads to those browsers. Banner ad standards have changed over the years to larger sizes, in part due to increased resolution of standard monitors and browsers, in part to provide advertisers with more impact for their investment. The standards continue to evolve. Banner ads can be targeted to internet users in many different ways in order to reach the advertiser's most relevant audience. Behavioral retargeting, demographic targeting, geographic targeting, and site based targeting are all common ways in which advertisers choose to target their banner ads.
Affiliate marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers place campaigns with a potentially large number of small (and large) publishers, whom are only paid media fees when traffic to the advertiser is garnered, and usually upon a specific measurable campaign result (a form, a sale, a sign-up, etc.). Today, this is usually accomplished through contracting with an affiliate network.
Affiliate marketing was an invention by CDNow.com in 1994 and was excelled by Amazon.com when it launched its Affiliate Program, called Associate Program in 1996. The online retailer used its program to generate low cost brand exposure and provided at the same time small websites a way to earn some supplemental income.
In addition to contextual targeting, online advertising can be targeted based on a user's online behavior. This practice is known as behavioral targeting. For example, if a user is known to have recently visited a number of automotive shopping / comparison sites based on clickstream analysis enabled by cookies stored on the user's computer, that user can then be served auto-related ads when they visit other, non-automotive sites.
In the United States the Federal Trade Commission has been involved in the oversight of behavioral targeting for some time. In 2011 the FTC proposed a "Do Not Track" mechanism to allow Internet users to opt-out of behavioral targeting.
Semantic advertising applies semantic analysis techniques to web pages. The process is meant to accurately interpret and classify the meaning and/or main subject of the page and then populate it with targeted advertising spots. By closely linking content to advertising, it is assumed that the viewer will be more likely to show an interest (i.e., through engagement) in the advertised product or service.
Given below is a list of top Ad server vendors in 2008 with figures in millions of viewers published in an Attributor survey. Since 2008 Google controls estimated 69% of the online advertising market.[10]
| Vendor | Ad viewers (millions) |
|---|---|
| 1,118 | |
| DoubleClick (Google) | 1,079 |
| Yahoo! | 362 |
| MSN (Microsoft) | 309 |
| AOL | 156 |
| Adbrite | 73 |
| Total | 3,097 |
It should be noted that Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007 for a consideration of $3.1 billion. The above survey was based on a sample of 68 million domains.