Online

In the wider context, a lure needs to attract an audience to ads. Few people seek out ads. Something has to lure an audience to where the persuasive messages will be seen or heard. Therefore, the function of the various media is to deliver an audience to persuaders.

Yet, increasingly, advertising banners, buttons, flashers, and pop ups are crowding -- or cluttering -- the pages. Many people feel intruded upon, or annoyed. In the future, we are likely to see more, not less, commercial persuasion (including ads which many people see as obtrusive and obnoxious), no matter what kind of blockers are developed.

Whatever attracts an audience, attracts an advertiser.

The online advertiser basically has two tasks in attention-getting: to lure an audience to a specific site; and to keep them there as long as possible.

To lure audiences to the site (considering the wider context of millions of other sites), many tactics are used, including:

Making it easy to recognize and remember (or guess) by using already-known brand names or corporate names (such as playboy.com | cnn.com | toyota.com); or obvious names for topics and events (such as travel.com | olympics.org).

Putting key terms (descriptors and contents) in the source code of "Title" carefully in order that the major Search Engines (such as Google, Alta Vista) will pick them up so that computer queries will generate many hits.

Getting a strategic location, such as the places where most people enter the Internet, the portals (such as America Online, Earthlink, Yahoo, Verizon) which provide a variety of services (e-mail, chat groups, news). By 2008, social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook became prime locations for advertisers to target the youth market.

"On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My,’ writes David Browne, for example, ”The Web is awash in sites that begin with that most personal of pronouns, and not simply MySpace." [over 710,00 URLs now start with "My"] "Collectively, they amount to a new world of Web sites designed to imply a one-on-one connection with a corporation or large business."

Closely related to luring an audience to visit a site is making it easy to return, by using Bookmarks or Favorites.

Using other media (television, direct mailings, magazine ads, press releases) to introduce the site to new potential audiences.

New information, changes, and frequent updates are important, especially in sites which attract a repeat audience: daily cartoons, jokes, horoscopes, opinion polls, contests, sweepstakes, and freebies. Instructional sites (DYI, How-to-do-it) are known for their ability to attract and retain specialized audiences and link them to related products.

In the very early days of the internet, most mainstream advertisers simply dismissed online audiences as being composed of nerds and techies, teen age game players, and people with more time on their hands than money in their pockets. A second phase developed when audience demographic studies indicated an increasingly upscale audience, predominantly male, well educated, and technically oriented.Then, the accelerating growth of AOL (and other service providers) broadened audiences.

By 2003, women shopping for gifts and clothes became a major part (more than 52%) of the online audience. This rapid growth has continued. During the 2005 Christmas season, online purchases became firmly established as a major source of commerce. As the audience changes online, so also will the ads. By 2008, advertisers claimed that women made 83% of family spending decisions, so increasingly they targeted women on the Web.

For the first time, during the 2004 political campaign, precisely-targeted online ads were common, according to Cliff Sloan of Newsweek.com, "because they can be put up quickly and changed on the fly, even allowing a response in real time to breaking news or an opposing candidate's charges." Moveon.org, started by a progressive blogger, Eli Pariser, pioneered a movement starting outside the traditional Democrat/Republican parties, backed Howard Dean, a relatively unknown candidate. By the 2008 campaign, their online activism was instrumental in bringing another unknown, Barack Obama, to win the Democratic candidacy.

By the 2008 elections, bloggers became a major factor in the campaigns: sites like The Drudge Report on the Right and Huffington Post on the Left amassed huge audiences by gathering and grouping data from their partisan sources. Where the audiences go, the advertisers will be there.

By January, 2006, Wired Magazine reported: "Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising.... a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, is poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US -- unless click fraud ruins it."

Today, there's no longer a debate about the importance of online advertising.

After Jakob Nielsen published his extensive survey "Usability of Websites for Children, Ages 5-11," he was interviewed in a feature article in Newsweek (4/22/02) asking what was his most surprising result:

"The response to advertisements. Children don't distinguish between ads and content. To them, it's all information. A grown-up user clicks on an ad banner maybe once a year, but children do it all the time. They see a banner with a Pokemon character and they think it's a game. They don't realize it takes them to a different site.... My main advice for parents is to sit down with their kids at the computer, teach them to recognize ads. A Disney character in an ad doesn't mean that you'll get a game or a cartoon - it just means that someone has rented the character to sell a product."