The web and ways to market on the web continue to evolve at warp

speed – we see some positive and negative changes occurring - our

observations du jour:

1)Publishers are finally starting to charge for branded

content. It's still difficult to do, but we are seeing many

newsletter publishers charging from $30-100 per subscribe per annum.

And, most importantly, many people are finally starting to accept the

need to pay for quality content.

2)Contrary to popular opinion the web's epicenter is not San

Francisco, Tokyo, Washington D.C./northern VA, Seattle, London or

Austin – there is no epicenter, its everywhere. We now have over

407M (estimated according to Nua) people using the web and its become

a global medium/marketing venue/information highway.

3)More good news for ecommerce enabled business models, recent

published reports (Boston Consulting Group & eShop) indicate customer

acquisition costs have dropped from $45. per individual customer in Q-

4 of 2000 to $18. in Q-1 in 2001.

4)Adobe continues to push PDF format as a web standard, over

32% of corporate web sites today have Acrobat PDF-enabling their web

sites. Why we will never know (?), as it isn't an HTML standard

but was originally developed to facilitate printing of documents.

And, it doesn't work well on many web sites, especially for those

coming in with slow connections or when you are trying to view more

than a couple of pages.

5)Surprise, surprise splash pages are still increasing in

popularity, with an estimated 18% of web sites today incorporating

them. Let's be clear, we think they are really lame to use a

technical marketing term – they slow down the user experience

and

cause many people to click away from a web site in annoyance, no

bookmark and no return visit.

6)Opt-in e-mail continues to grow in popularity and to reflect

the web's ability to handle rich media content – the HTML

format is rapidly becoming standard in many e-mail campaigns and we

are starting to see streaming audio and video plug in components

(running in the background) and even integrated voice mail, as just

announced last month by YesMail. But, watch those conversion rates

fall, opt-in e-mail is in danger of becoming this year's banner

advertising.

7)Newsletters have become mainstream ways to communicate with

customers, generate revenue via ad inserts and drive a brand into the

marketplace. Now there are ASP (application service provider)

solutions being brought to market by Microsoft and many others than

enable a small or large company to manage all aspects of newsletter

marketing via a browser.

8)No secret the web is maturing, there's been a media firestorm

the last few weeks about how only four companies (AOL, Microsoft,

Yahoo and Napster) commanded approximately 50% of the overall traffic

on the web. Most disturbing to those of us not with the

aforementioned companies (Sidebar: am sure Steve Case and Bob Pittman

are very happy), eleven companies commanded this percentage about a

year ago.

9)Traditional media is experiencing the same market downturn

that Interactive ad agencies have been getting – look at your

recent Newsweek, Der Stern, Time, Business 2.0, Upside, Fast Company,

Wired and you'll see they would do Jenny Craig proud –

they've

lost a lot of ad weight.

10)Popups, popovers, popunders – whatever the term you want to

use for those annoying interstitial types of ads are still continuing

to be deployed on more and more web sites. We think they are just bad

marketing and are being used by sites or companies that can't

figure out how to generate revenue with content (see #1) or dare we

say real services!

About the Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of marketing experience He is the co-

founder of a Northern California and Brussels Belgium based,

privately held, Marketing Services and Software Company, Intelective

Communications, Inc. http://www.intelective.com Intelective focuses

exclusively on providing services to small to medium sized companies

that need strategic and tactical marketing services. He can be

reached at Lee@intelective.com