Marketing on the World Wide Web

The media are filled with headlines about the World Wide Web. It is proclaimed as the most important phenomenon since the personal computer that will transform business.

In fact, the World Wide Web is a well-known offspring of the Internet. It is a multimedia(text, sound, and graphics)subset of the Internet as a whole. After the Internet was first established, it spread to universities where scientists used it to exchange data and messages.

In 1989 a scientist at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, put forward a proposal to establish a single standard across all computer platforms that would allow users to easily view and exchange data. Sites that adopted this standard became part of the World Wide Web.

A Web site is a set of multimedia materials that computer users can access electronically.

A Web page is a single document at a Web site.

A link is a selection of highlightedtext or an image on a page that, when the visitor clicks on it with a mouse, it gives the visitor access to another page. Virtually all Web pages contain links that connect visitors to different pages on the site and to interesting pages on other Web sites.

Browsers are programs that automatically read and display information from a Web site. They also allow a visitor to move from one Web page to another by pointing and clicking on a link to access a new page.

A search engine is a computer program that searches for information on the Web. Although the term "browser" evokes images of a leisurely stroll through a familiar library, in reality the Web is much too large and disorganized to make browsing an attractive way to find information. To solve this problem, several sites have sprung up that feature search engines (e.g. Yahoo). An individual visits one of these engines and types in a keyword or phrase. The engine then displays titles and brief descriptions of all Web sites that contain this word or phrase in its text.

Marketing on the World Wide Web is currently a grand experiment. The Web's potential has drawn tens of thousands of companies on-line.

The Web presents a couple of major opportunities for marketers. First, a large and growing number of individuals and businesses access the Web. Web users also represent an attractive target market, and individuals are beginning to buy products. The business-to-business market opportunity appears to be even greater than the consumer one.

Advertising on the Ukrainian Internet increased more than fivefold in the last few years and is poised to grow even further as more people get hooked up to the information superhighway.The Ukrainian Banner Network (www.banner.kiev.ua) is the largest advertising network on the Ukrainian Internet in terms of the volume of ads.

Internet ad firms say that companies are rushing to establish a presence on the Internet for two reasons. First, they want to be ready for the huge increase in Internet users that is expected in Ukraine in the next few years, and second, they want to capitalize on the few, but wealthy users who are already online. As evidence of the Ukrainian Internet market potential, several new companies have joined the pack recently.

There is now a highly competitive situation where companies are competing for advertising space. And while Internet advertising budgets are still smaller than in the West, they are growing rapidly.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1439