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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zulu-tek, Inc. (ZULU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (6554)	5/5/1998 5:34:00 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18444

Surfing around, I discovered this. It's from something called BitSifter Digest: "how advertising saved the internet" SIFT THIS -- Whether you've been surfing for years or just weaned yourself from AOLs chat rooms, the chances are that you don't want to pay for content. Industry watchers claim this is an aftershock of the socialist roots of the Internet where no had to pay for anything, but it's simpler than that. When I go to San Jose Mercury News to read the headlines, I'm not sticking a quarter in some brown metal box to pull out a handful of dead tree, I'm staring at my favorite cathode ray tube and when I hit BACK on my browser, my content is gone. It's a problem of education. When someone forks over the cash, they want something they can touch in return. It's also a problem for advertising since this is where the real money shows up for publishers and we're still at the mercy of the banner ad. In order to offset the fact that no one is going to pay for subscriptions to their favorite sites, advertisers will need to pay more to support and the only way they'll do that is if they believe advertising on the 'Net is more valuable. Fortunately, two technologies are on their way to help. Targeted Content. My home page has been my.yahoo.com for months now - possibly the longest stint for any homepage since I started surfing regularly four years ago. Yahoo knows a lot about me because I've told them what I want to know about: my stocks, what news I care to read, what sports scores to show me, and what weather I need to know. Demographics galore. Using this information about me, they can target advertising specifically tailored for my tastes. This means more click-thrus to advertisers, which ultimately translates in more cash for content sites. Privacy advocates are going to get tense over the idea that companies are going to have profiles about their customers. They're going to scream about the possibilities of such profiles falling (or being sold) into the wrong hands and turning into huge mailing lists for spammers, but here's a thought: spam isn't spam when the recipient cares about what their receiving. A na‹ve, interesting thought. Related Content. An idea pioneered by Alexa Internet, the idea of related content is simple. Given a reasonably popular site on the 'Net, what are the most closely related (and popular) sites? Sure, this kind of information is available via Yahoo, but what netizens really care about is what other surfers think rather than what a search engine does. Alexa provides related content by tracking the surfing habits of users via a small application that sits between your net connection and your browser. An example. Let's say I'm looking for hockey box scores on the net. Being relatively dumb, I start by going to NHL.COM and discover that the site is a marketing nightmare and box scores are buried beneath a pile advertising and hype. I remember that a friend told me that ESPN's NHL site is pretty slick, so I go there next. Being easy to navigate and stocked with lots of juicy stats, I spend a good portion of the evening surfing the site. Alexa watches and records the entire interaction with the web. When the next user comes to the NHL.COM, the Alexa application displays a toolbar which lists ESPN's site as being one which is closely 'related' to the NHLs one. This is a vastly simplified example, but it demonstrates what Alexa is trying to do: Make the entire 'Net one big Neilsen family. Alexa also suffers from the same privacy concerns as targeted content, but they've been proactive about keeping your recorded navigation of the Web separate from who you are. Alexa doesn't care who you are, just what you did. The companies making serious cash via the Internet are still few and far between. Executive staffs are nervous when the likes of Amazon.com are trading at 85 dollars a share, but has still to turn a profit. The dynamic nature of the web and the above emerging technologies will help advertisers to stop thinking of the Web as an interesting experiment and more of a cash cow. mar. 27, 1998