ADVERTISING revenue on the World Wide Web soared 83 per cent in the first half of the year, and the Internet is set to become a $5 billion a year commercial medium by the year 2000, according to research firm Jupiter Communications.
Expenditure reached $71.7 million in the first half of the year, and Jupiter estimates it will jump to $312 million for the year as a whole. But despite this optimistic growth, most advertisers are still hi tech companies advertising on each other's sites. The consumer product companies that are the biggest advertisers on national magazines and in broadcasting continue to tread cautiously on the Net.
"When those companies get going, that will be the trumpet call that Internet advertising has really arrived," says Peter Storck, senior analyst at Jupiter. "But that's only going to happen gradually.
Currently the Web's biggest advertiser is Microsoft, which shifted its corporate strategy heavily toward the Net this year. It spent $2.9 million in the first as it promoted its Internet Explorer Web browser (see Computimes, August 26th).
Its Internet archrival Netscape remained top for generating advertising revenue. Its $9.7 million accounted for about 13 per cent of the total, while leading Web indexers or search engines which have dominated the medium since the beginning rounded out the top five.
ESPN Sports Zone (a sports information service related to cable giant ESPN) and ZD Net (created from Ziff Davis's computer magazines) were the only traditional media to crack Jupiter's advertising top 10. Publishers such as Time Warner Pathfinder and the New York Times which have created Web products were lower on the list.
Jupiter's survey uses published rates and calculates the activity at each of the 100 sites it follows, which account for an estimated 93 per cent of all Web advertising expenditure.