And, while it may be impossible to ignore some of the new online ad formats that invade a huge chunk of the screen with distracting video images, it is still far too easy to dismiss them. Clever graphics, yes. But they're not likely to entice your average consumer, unless he happens to be in charge of information technology spending for a major corporation.
Advertisers remain slow to spend money on the Internet.
GoTo said its first-quarter revenues, all from online advertising, came close to tripling, and it made a confident prediction that it would become profitable by year end. In other words, while other sites offer advertising only as the final layer of a platform rich with independent content like news, stock quotes and sports scores, there is nothing independent about GoTo. The only information you will ever find when you search its site is information that someone paid to put there. GoTo, on the other hand, is only concerned with who pays the most for a listing. It may sound too mercenary for the purists who still see the Internet as an academic medium, but the financial community is celebrating it as a dot-com business model that may actually work.