The table below summarizes a study conducted by O'Reilly and Associates conducted in June 1996 (O'Reilly 96). This study was done by conducting interviews with MIS directors and Web masters of companies sampled from the Dun & Bradstreet dabatase of over 7 million enterprises.
Business Size | % On the Web | % Planning to by end of '96 |
---|---|---|
Large | 51 | 15 |
Medium | 25 | 17 |
Small | 9 | 8 |
Users may not actually buy products/services through the Internet because of security reasons, but what is the impact of advertistments in the Internet on the users? The survey shows that 37% of the consumers are turned off by advertiser supported content on the Internet, while the remainder of the users are most interested in interactive ads. Ads with detailed information on the products, coined "advermation" by Coopers and Lybrand, (41%), gained the most favour, while "customization" ads, tailored to meet consumer's interest, had 25% of the vote of users who weren't turned off by ads. Another 25% of the users liked "advermarts", ads that facilitate ordering (25%), while only a 9% of the users were interested in primarily interactive ads.
In the meanwhile, businesses, armed with the knowledge that current web users on the whole are more affluent than the the average consumer are spending heavily on advertistments. According to a report from Frost & Sullivan (Brown, 96), Internet advertising accounts for 3.4 percent or $85 million of all ad dollars spent in 1996. The market is expected to grow to 22.2 percent or $5.48 billion by 2002.
Another type of commerce that is generated through the World Wide Web is access to information. Some web servers have begun to charge for access to their database of information. There are no statistics about how widely used these services are, but since most of the information in cyberspace are currently free, most users would be very hesitant to pay for information if they think that they can get it free from other sources on the Web.
Copyright © 1996 Mei See Yeoh, All Rights Reserved
Mei See Yeoh <myeoh@vt.edu>
Last modified: Sat Oct 26 13:15:51 1996