Many surfers of the World Wide Web find Internet advertising methods incredibly irritating. How often have you been annoyed by advertisements popping up all over the screen and strange objects flashing things you don’t wish to see right in your face? Surely it is quite frequent experience for many PC users. A further disadvantage faced by Internet advertisers is the fact that the Internet is so complex that it is capable of blowing the mind of even the most dynamic marketer. In the US, there used to be just three major television stations to choose from. Now we have an infinite amount of pages on a complex network so it is clear why people are hesitant about putting advertisements on them.
Nevertheless, Internet marketing is growing rapidly. To name one of a multitude of examples, thanks to in depth market research and advertising, almost all UK hotel bookings are now made online, as are flights. Perhaps more importantly, advertising is almost certainly behind the $44.6 billion bid from Microsoft to buy Yahoo. It is thought that, without such potential revenue from advertising, the bid would not need to be so enormous. Internet booking in the United States is expected to increase by 13.4% in 2008, proving that this field of advertising is on the rise. However, when we look closer, it is perhaps not rising as fast as it should be.
Americans on average spend 14 hours per week surfing the internet and 14 hours watching television. However, marketers in the tourism industry spend 22% of their dollars on TV advertising and just 6% on internet advertising. It just doesn’t add up. The afore-mentioned expected increase in 2008 is huge, yet still only accounts for 7.2% of all advertising in the USA. It seems that once marketers get used to the complications of the Internet, the figures could grow even further and advertising could become even more common online.
