# The Computer Revolution/E commerce/Advertising

Advertising online is newest and greatest trend when it commerce to online commerce! With the emergence of online advertising businesses can advertise 24 hours a day 7 days a week, and thousands of websites if they're willing to pay the price! Advertising can be seen on the majority of websites promoting anything from sneakers to children's toys! Anything and everything can be advertised in this day and age over the internet. E-commerce has benefited and suffered from this in the following way: The benefits include the rampant accessibility of advertising places and forms, such as the different types of media can be used, anything you could imagine is being advertised with video, pictures, sounds, music, graphics and many more techniques have been used to grab the consumers' eye that have never been thought possible before! The drawbacks are that there is so much advertising nowadays that it's hard to really capture someone's attention online, we see thousand of advertisements when we are surfing the net and is hard to create that one that someone will remember, as well it drives up competition among e-commerce businesses due to the large amount of advertising that is out there that they must compete with!
E-Commerce Using Virtual Reality
A great method of e-commerce advertising is through virtual reality. Virtual reality is creating images or environments in three-dimensional on the computer to make it look realistic. By using virtual reality, consumers are able to look at the products on the computer exactly how they would in person. This also helps the suppliers because they are able to advertise in a newer and more advanced approach. A good example is when buying a new car; instead of having to drive from place to place looking at different cars, by searching on the website they offer will show the variety of colors at different angles. Virtual Reality is great advertising way for e-commerce.
Banner Ads.
The most popular form of on-line advertising is banner ads. A banner ad is a special sort of hypertext link. The link is displayed as a box containing graphics, usually with text elements, or animation. A Web server is instructed to bring up a particular Web page when a user clicks on the banner. Much like print ads, banner ads come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) specifies eight different banner sizes, according to pixel dimensions. The IAB's standard banner sizes are: • 486 x 60 Pixels (Full Banner) • 392 x 72 Pixels (Full Banner with Vertical Navigation Bar) • 234 x 60 Pixels (Half Banner) • 120 x 240 Pixels (Vertical Banner) • 125 x 125 Pixels (Square Button) • 120 x 90 Pixels (Button 1) • 120 x60 Pixels (Button 2) • 88 x 31 Pixels (Micro Button) (http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/508676/508767/ad_unit)
A full banner (486x60 pixels) is by far the most popular. The actual graphic content also varies greatly among banner ads. The simplest banner ads feature only one, static GIF or JPEG image which is linked to the advertiser’s home page. More common is the GIF-animated banner which displays several different images in succession, sometimes to create the effect of animation motion. Then there are rich media banner ads that use audio, video, or Java and Shockwave programming. These banner ads have larger file sizes and are usually interactive beyond their simple linking function.
Click Fraud
Click fraud is a term used within the advertising sector to describe violations in the legitimacy of a website's generated ad revenue. Businesses that pay to have their ad sponsored(or placed) on a website, that are required to pay a fixed amount each time it is clicked, are the major victims of this phenomenon. Competing businesses can use botnets(networks of remotely controlled computers) or their own machines to manually click their competitors' links and deplete their budget. The budget is wasted because none of the clicks were from legitimate users with an interest in the business. In an alternative scenario, the fraudulent clicks originate from the website hosting the sponsored links in order to generate more revenue for the owner.
Facebook's Impact on Advertising
Facebook's impact on advertising has been larger than anyone could've predicted. Advertising companies spend millions of dollars a year researching what demographic visited what website the most so that the placement of advertisements what as effective as possible. But with the emergence of Facebook, the risk was reduced by allowing businesses to have their advertisements reach exactly the target audience that they want. There are more than half a billion users on Facebook with all of their information on the site. A Facebook user is able to click 'Like' on many sites in order to express interest in a product,article, picture etc... That information is stored and used when determining what advertisement banners each Facebook is going to see. And a Facebook profile can be created for anything, such as:business, animal, product, service, so that someone can proactively pursue Facebook members and engage them with whatever they are trying to advertise.