Seeking to convince their parent companies that there’s money to be made on the Internet, the Webmasters of the largest US Web sites are going to make the implementation of DAA dynamic advertising allocation technology a top implementation priority for 1997. The main topic of conversation at last week’s meeting of the self-described Webmonsters Group in Breckinridge, Colorado – which includes the Webmasters of CNN, C/Net, Netscape Communications Corp, @Home Corp, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Excite Inc and ESPN – was advertising, and how dynamic advertising allocation can be used to boost revenue from advertising. The members of the group appear fairly certain that deregulation of the telecommunications markets plus bandwidth and technology advances will drive more users onto the Web, predicting traffic will increase by as much as tenfold. Moreover if, as they suspect, WebTV and other Internet services delivered to television sets in homes take off in a big way, many more people will be Web surfing for entertainment rather than for work – and ironically probably most actively during commercial breaks. To better exploit the advertising opportunity the trends present, the Webmonsters want to implement technology which will enable them to deliver a customized set of advertising to each visitor created according to recorded profiles of their Web surfing behavior. Tracking software can record a user’s movements between sites and based upon this behaviour direct specific kinds of advertising to be shown on the Web pages a user visits using DAA technology. Because this type of advertising is so focused the group expects to be able to attract significantly more dollars than the $157.4m a Coopers & Lybrand study says was spent on advertising for the Internet in the first three quarters of 1996. What they are not so satisfied with, however, is the kind of performance they are getting using whatever DAA-enabling products exist today. Such products don’t meet the manufacturer’s performance claims they say, and haven’t been properly put through their paces. One issue for at least some of those in the group is how to get their static page content into object form so that pages can be changed dynamically. If the US government were to make a ruling which meant a site had to black out all pages with a certain kind of content, those that currently store pages in a static form would likely be stringing all kinds of system commands together to try and recover and change each individual page. Stored in object form a particular attribute could be dynamically applied to all pages at the same time. The sites are also looking at personalising the look and feel of pages for users in terms of color, language or tools bars. The Webmonsters group is the brainchild of the Discovery Channel Online, which proposed Webmasters from the top 20 or so Web sites. Members plans meet on a quarterly basis to discuss common issues and the future of the Web and to drive some requirements to technology suppliers. They hope the success of the Wall Street Journal’s $50 web-based personalized interactive edition – it is said to have won over 50,000 paid-up subscribers – will drive a wider acceptance of fee-based web services.
