> I seldom buy things online as it is
> much easier to have a close look to buy things.

Once you have decided the manufacturer and the model of what you want to
buy, about all that separates the sellers is price and honesty. Many
"brick and mortar" retailers have complained that they have become
showrooms for the online stores. The customers decide what to buy "getting
a close look" in the local retail store, then shop for the lowest price on
line. Local retailers can provide "free shipping" (they don't charge you
to carry it out of the store) and immediate delivery, which online stores
cannot do. Online retail is growing very quickly, but I think it is still
a very small fraction of total retail.

Online advertising is an interesting issue. For "content based
advertising" where ads are put up based on the content of the page, even
though you are not interested in buying anything, seem like they'd be as
effective as other mass market advertising, or perhaps a bit more, since
you can respond immediately by clicking the ad. How much attention do you
pay to all the ads in print and broadcast? Do you pay more or less
attention to web content ads?

Online SEARCH advertising, however, is, I believe, MUCH more effective. A
fair amount of search is because someone is actually interested in buying
something. Of course everyone would like to turn up as number one in the
search results, but not everyone can. An advertiser can, however, show us
as the number one ad result (like AdWords on the right side of Google
results) by bidding higher than others. Since the user is actually looking
for what is being advertised, this seems like it would be far more
effective than content based advertising. Back when I handled the
GoogleAdWords account for my previous employer, our click through rate for
search was ten or more times higher than for content.

As with online retail, I believe online advertising is a small portion of
the total advertising market, but it is growing. What percentage of the
total advertising market it ends up at will be interesting to see.

By the way, you can buy those super effective content based ads on my
website below!

Harold



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