TimmyHVirtual Real-estate – The booming market
July 8th 2008 00:21
“Buy land. God isn’t making any more of it.” Maybe not, but there are many other forms of Real-estate worth investing in, if you know how.
The Internet is expanding at an exponential rate. Thank goodness there is an almost infinite number of Web pages. With these astounding figures as Internet realities it might seem logical that we should think that online Real-estate is easy to come by. But unfortunately for plug-in developers, advertisers and widget-makers, this is not the case.
In the beginning of the Internet, we had the dreaded pop-up. These annoying little creatures made surfing the Web agonising to the point where we virtually ignored their advertising message. But advertisers aren’t stupid, they had a contingency plan.
The early Noughtys saw the emergence of toolbars that we could add to our browsers. But the inherit problem with adding toolbars to the top of your browser is that you lose content on the rest of the page, a sacrifice that surfers are less than pleased with. This makes the top of an Internet browser some of the most expensive Real-estate in the world.
The most recent market trend has been adding information directly to the top of search pages. Applications like Surf Canyon and AVG plant an icon at the end of each search result.
The Surf Canyon icon will find results which are similar to the ones that are open in your browser and inserts them wherever you are on the page. It also digs up relevant sponsored links and adds them to the list on the right hand side of screen both at the top and bottom.
The advantage of a system like this is that the user has to make no considerable behavioural change. The system is integrated seamlessly into the browser window and offers something to the user that neither pop-ups nor toolbars did, intelligence.
It makes sense to target surfers with information they might be interested in. Not doing so is just blind advertising and investing in low-yield Real-estate, as any farmer would understand. Web start-ups are becoming much more user oriented. Google is the ideal product example. It has been so successful because its algorithms and programming are designed to bring users the products, services and links they would otherwise have to search for themselves.
People have no patience for seeing their Real-estate eaten up by useless advertising. So if you, as a Web-developer feel the need to co-opt information, make sure you learn how to target it at your audience.
The Internet is expanding at an exponential rate. Thank goodness there is an almost infinite number of Web pages. With these astounding figures as Internet realities it might seem logical that we should think that online Real-estate is easy to come by. But unfortunately for plug-in developers, advertisers and widget-makers, this is not the case.
In the beginning of the Internet, we had the dreaded pop-up. These annoying little creatures made surfing the Web agonising to the point where we virtually ignored their advertising message. But advertisers aren’t stupid, they had a contingency plan.
The early Noughtys saw the emergence of toolbars that we could add to our browsers. But the inherit problem with adding toolbars to the top of your browser is that you lose content on the rest of the page, a sacrifice that surfers are less than pleased with. This makes the top of an Internet browser some of the most expensive Real-estate in the world.
The most recent market trend has been adding information directly to the top of search pages. Applications like Surf Canyon and AVG plant an icon at the end of each search result.
The Surf Canyon icon will find results which are similar to the ones that are open in your browser and inserts them wherever you are on the page. It also digs up relevant sponsored links and adds them to the list on the right hand side of screen both at the top and bottom.
The advantage of a system like this is that the user has to make no considerable behavioural change. The system is integrated seamlessly into the browser window and offers something to the user that neither pop-ups nor toolbars did, intelligence.
It makes sense to target surfers with information they might be interested in. Not doing so is just blind advertising and investing in low-yield Real-estate, as any farmer would understand. Web start-ups are becoming much more user oriented. Google is the ideal product example. It has been so successful because its algorithms and programming are designed to bring users the products, services and links they would otherwise have to search for themselves.
People have no patience for seeing their Real-estate eaten up by useless advertising. So if you, as a Web-developer feel the need to co-opt information, make sure you learn how to target it at your audience.
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