From the basement of his house in San Francisco, Chris Lindland runs a successful specialty retail business that sells horizontal corduroy pants to customers across the country. Tim Carter turned years of hands-on experience as a building contractor in Ohio into a new career as Webmaster of “askthebuilder.com,” a venture that in its first year netted him more than four times the income he earned in his best year as a builder.
And Dr. J. Glen House, a Colorado physician and quadriplegic, just launched Disaboom.com, a Web community for America’s 54 million people with disabilities [it’s their initial focus as they build a “community” and share resources] that has logged more than 1.5 million unique visitors since October. These businesses could not have survived 15 years ago. They’re thriving today because of interactive advertising.
Consumers today enjoy an extraordinary amount of cost-free content and services on the Internet. Search engines, e-mail, social networking sites, video and photo storage, product-comparison tools, news, entertainment, maps, job banks, and resume services and e-commerce marketplaces are available at the click of a mouse — and free of charge. But none of these services are actually free. Advertising is funding them. And without this advertising subsidy, consumers would be forced to pay for many of these services, assuming they were available at all.
Advertising greases the wheels of the Web economy. Internet advertising revenues topped $21 billion in 2007, about one-third the amount marketers spend on national broadcast and cable television, according to the Interactive Advertising Board [IAB] and the Robert Coen Insider’s Report. By 2011, that amount is projected to more than triple, to $62 billion, surpassing newspapers as the largest advertising medium, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson’s 21st Communications Industry Forecast, which came out in August, 2007. While Wall Street remains riveted to the multibillion-dollar acquisition…