Any media can be shared. This capability provides a significant opportunity for portals, traditional search engines, and other commercial content providers. Just as search engines such as Yahoo and Altavista make money by selling keywords and advertising, any commercial content provider can create interesting content-rich advertisements that are pushed in answer to search queries. In a competitive information space like the Web, where time and attention are golden, users resent content-free ads that waste time because they provide no information or entertainment. PPN software works both ways.
Users can boycott a blatant ad and filter out an entire Web site.
Just as spam refers to unwanted junk email, the PPN user community will coin a term to describe content-free ads to be ostracized. But the financial opportunities are too great, so commercial content providers will learn quickly what works and what does not. Companies have not been able to manage this part of the Web-browsing experience previously. Now companies will be able to control how search queries are answered more intelligently, taking charge and driving the flow of information traffic. Like everything else that is Web-based, probably not very long.