Monday, November 6, 2000		Article

Net advertising awaits higher PC penetration
by Peeyush Agnihotri

CYBERIA may be a surfer’s abode or an entrepreneur’s refuge but it certainly is not an advertiser’s playground. Most of the sellers still prefer print and electronic media to advertise their wares, though market pundits paint a rosy future for advertising on the Web.

Barring e-commerce sites, advertisers do not find the Web lucrative. A Web survey of persons who have actually bought things on the Net reveals that 12 per cent of customers arrived at the vendor’s site from an advertisement and 88 per cent of them navigated their way through other means.

What’s more intriguing is that only the top 0.01 per cent of the sites can generate sufficient revenues from ads and click-throughs on a Net advertisement are only 1 per cent, thereby meaning that 99 per cent of persons seeing an ad do not even bother to click on it.

Bharat Zutshi, a branch manager of an ad agency, says they have not done more than 10 to 15 Web ads during the past six months. "Unless PC penetration gets high countrywide, which may not be before 2003 AD, and until online shopping catches up, generating ad revenues on the Net may remain a distant dream," he adds.

A TV commercial or a print ad requires no action on the viewer’s part, except viewing or scanning, whereas no one likes to wait for fancy brand messages with tortoise-paced site downloading on the Net. The Web is a customer-dominated medium and the surfer owns the Back button.

"Actually (Web) reach is villain No. 1. Bandwidth is a pain in the neck and hyperlinks move at a snail’s pace. When the Internet becomes accessible through the cable, surfing might become cost-effective and this may attract advertisers in future. Further, both buyer and seller are familiar with the print and electronic media," says Prof Subhash Vaidya, Dean, Faculty of Management and Commerce, Panjab University. "I would, however, like to add here that B2B portals have already started making an impact," he comments.

Though there is space limitation in the print media and time constraint on television, the Net is far superior to both in these spheres. Right now, portals are busy promoting each other through Click buttons on their respective sites (for example, icleo and webdunia) in classic I-scratch-your-back . . . style. "Advertisers already have an established base in the print and electronic media," says Rajan Jain of webdunia.com.

Even when the Net becomes ubiquitous in homes, advertising might remain limited to related segments. For example, cosmetic companies might prefer a women-oriented portal or PC sellers may put up ads on a techy vortal.

Gitesh Tibrewal from vsplash.com says some groundwork needs to done and awareness needs to be created before running a banner on the Net starts making sense to advertisers. "As advertisers are not sure about the Net users’ demographic profile they do not prefer the cyber route. Those surfing the Net have no time and splashing banners is not a target segment approach," he adds.

Analysts predict that the next three years are going to be e-crucial for India. Probably it would be then that advertisers lure surfers.