Still, several years after the first Internet ads began appearing, the majority of Internet advertisements remain in the form of banners. Banners have been called the billboards of the Internet because readers generally must navigate past them whether or not they want to. Though one-percent response rates can translate into large revenue streams when promotions are extremely large or customers extremely valuable, advertisers would certainly love to increase their yields. This has been a difficult problem for direct marketers to solve, because their ability to target customers depends on the data available to them, which often tends to give only a crude and incomplete picture of any individual.
Brokers link ad buyers with websites that are selling space.
Their success is partly attributable to an ability to gather detailed customer information, but it is also the result of their ability to experiment, learn, and adapt more quickly and in finer detail than is typically possible in a paper-based environment. The aggregation of a large number of users is quite valuable to advertising buyers, particularly on the Internet, where with one or two notable exceptions the audience is distributed quite sparsely over a large number of different sites. In addition to offering a great number of Internet users on a variety of sites, brokers offer tracking and targeting technologies that are not available in traditional media. All of these capabilities are the result of applications of key technologies being employed on the web.