A few organizations have floated the notion of selling ad space on their intranet pages to defray IT costs. Every major portal to the Web is thronged with animated advertising, and search engines sell keywords to the highest bidder. This situation raises the question of whether, to enjoy the fruits of free information, we may have to allow a little more marketing in our lives. In turn, those of us who produce and read publications have to wonder whether the once-rigorous boundary between advertisers and editors is being weakened by the demand for precise audience data. Publications gain access to this data through their subscription bases and supplement it with reader surveys.
Advertisers prize any insight they can get into the nature and habits of their target audiences.
This has been true forever, without editors and advertisers openly colluding. Free information on the Web. It guts the subscription revenue model and drives content providers into the arms of advertisers. Autonomy Inc. Whatever the solution, the need for these measures makes it clear that allocating sufficient bandwidth to handle advertising graphics on your network is only part of the cost of free information.