Advertisers are fickle johns. Worse, they're lousy tippers. But even if these rosy forecasts came true, they would amount to less than 5 percent of the total spent in advertising through other media last year. Even Fortune 500 companies are Internet tire kickers. Should anyone show you a business plan that bets big on Web advertising in the next 18 months, recommend a strong cup of coffee.
Surfers are fickle too.
Before littering your site with crass come-ons, consider the multitudes of surfers who click away because they're sick of promotions that hijack their browsers. Or who find better things to do with their lives than wait for an advertiser's sparklies, animations, and Java scripts to load before reaching content. When surfers flee, so will advertisers. No one knows how to effectively measure consumer response to an Internet ad. No one knows the formula for the size and content of an ad that sells.