The once pristinely scientific Web has been bought, sold, spammed, and plastered with advertising to appeal to the mass market. Make no mistake, it is no longer the exclusive plaything of dedicated geeks striving to remake the world into some sort of virtual utopia. Web builders, meanwhile, have to cope with Web ads growing ever bigger, more obtrusive, and harder to design around. Sites are augmenting relatively benign banners with sponsorships and implementing every size and shape of portal imaginable.
Search engines sell targeted ads to go along with every search word from laptop to lingerie.
The danger, of course, is that we're blurring the line between content and advertising, diluting the impact of our sites. If the audience can't tell if a site's content is included for their benefit or merely to serve the needs of someone who paid for the privilege, they won't trust what they see. The Web has already earned a reputation for more often resembling junk mail than major-media productions. We're never going to be taken seriously if we can't abide even the relatively lax standards of TV and magazines. The irony of the situation is that even with the mad rush to sell anything and everything connected to the Web, the medium is still struggling to establish itself commercially.