If commerce is the engine that will drive the Web, then interstitial advertising could well be the highway everyone will take to get there.
Interstitial advertising uses a different approach than that of ad banners.
Rather than appearing as a small image on the Web page, an interstitial ad takes over the entire Web browser window, displaying itself after a user clicks to go to a new page, and before that new page has loaded. Modem speed and bandwidth problems have no effect on the ad, because the graphic and text components have been preloaded onto the computer's hard drive in the background while the user is online. As a result, the interstitial ad enjoys the same high-resolution quality for images and animations as any computer program playing in real time. Streamix, a provider of streaming video for Web sites, will be marketing HyperStitial, its version of an interstitial system, by year's end. The client program will transparently load when Netscape or Internet Explorer is opened, and will begin bringing advertising onto the hard drive as a background task whenever the computer is idle online.