Ever since the concept of money people have been profiting off of every aspect of daily life. With a user base of 1.6 billion[1] the amount of people that can be reached on the internet is nearly endless. This aspect alone is what makes internet marketing so profitable; quantity can be better than quality in this case. However, internet users are gradually catching on to the clever schemes internet marketers use to make a profit online. According to an online study only 8% of internet users actually click on advertisements shown on websites[2]. This is forcing online marketers, merchants, and advertisers to change their tactics away from traditional banner advertisements and use methods that many would consider immoral to make a quick profit online.
Internet Marketing has evolved hand-in-hand with the birth of the internet in the 1990’s. Early marketing campaigns consisted of simple banner ads, e-mail newsletters, and interactive pop-up windows that all would push the sale of a service or product. To most marketers the internet can be considered as just another advertising medium like television, radio, and print. The main advantage of marketing on the internet is that anybody can do it at a relatively cheap price. An average person would have a hard time making an ad for a magazine or a commercial on TV. Sending an email or designing a website on the other hand is simple and free and the same audience can be reached. People who first adopted these techniques easily sold their products on the internet as they had little competition. As more people saw the potential of advertising to users online the traditional methods started to lose their effectiveness. For example, today everybody gets spam e-mail that is trying to sell them some bogus weight loss product or some other product you would probably never buy. Spammers know almost 99% of people are going to immediately delete the e-mail however there is always somebody who is going to buy the product no matter how outrageous it may be.
Like most other subcultures, Internet Marketing starts off as a simple hobby; something interesting to do during their free time. Most Internet Marketers are very technology savvy as developing new innovative websites require extensive knowledge of computer coding such as HTML, PHP, Flash, and Java. The most popular way of getting together and communicating is done through online communities and message boards. These online communities allow people from all over the world to socialize, share ideas, methods, and beliefs. The biggest advantage of online gathering is how diverse it has allowed the subculture to become. People of all ages from all over the world are discovering these online marketing communities, researching methods, and becoming part of the subculture. Currently males mostly dominate these communities however women are quickly catching on to the craze. Unlike other subcultures we have studied which have a very specific style and taste, Internet Marketers can have any style. People are not judged based off of how they act or what they may believe in but rather how they treat others.
Basically, the internet marketing ideology is quite simple and remains unchanged since its development over two decades ago. Certainly, the goal of most marketers is to make an online salary they can comfortably live off of. Since this subculture is new and mostly unknown by the average American, it grows almost exclusively via the internet. Internet Marketing methods and techniques are mostly self-taught from guides that other marketers either sell or post to the internet and through simple trial and error. The traditional media has recently started to realize the huge potential of advertising online as well. For example, Comcast and NBC are now forcing viewers on Hulu to sit through lengthy commercials and say that “the growth that we are seeing in online advertising and digital in general, having these kind of positions, we think, is real scale and real growth opportunity in the future”.[3]
However, like most fields in business Internet Marketing has become highly competitive and people are starting to play dirty. Certain classes of people will always be more profitably than others and marketers are tending to exploit this by using their weaknesses against them. There is now an entire community named BlackHatWorld dedicated to making money online in ways that may be less than moral. For this research paper I was determined to finding out the boundaries of marketers on the internet. What kind of people do they target and what makes them different? Should there be more laws and regulations to control internet content?
[1] Internet World Stats
[2] 8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Clicks
[3] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/03/comcast-and-ge-on-hulu-tv-everywhere/
Ever since the concept of money people have been profiting off of every aspect of daily life. With a user base of 1.6 billion[1] the amount of people that can be reached on the internet is nearly endless. This aspect alone is what makes internet marketing so profitable; quantity can be better than quality in this case. However, internet users are gradually catching on to the clever schemes internet marketers use to make a profit online. According to an online study only 8% of internet users actually click on advertisements shown on websites[2]. This is forcing online marketers, merchants, and advertisers to change their tactics away from traditional banner advertisements and use methods that many would consider immoral to make a quick profit online.
Internet Marketing has evolved hand-in-hand with the birth of the internet in the 1990’s. Early marketing campaigns consisted of simple banner ads, e-mail newsletters, and interactive pop-up windows that all would push the sale of a service or product. To most marketers the internet can be considered as just another advertising medium like television, radio, and print. The main advantage of marketing on the internet is that anybody can do it at a relatively cheap price. An average person would have a hard time making an ad for a magazine or a commercial on TV. Sending an email or designing a website on the other hand is simple and free and the same audience can be reached. People who first adopted these techniques easily sold their products on the internet as they had little competition. As more people saw the potential of advertising to users online the traditional methods started to lose their effectiveness. For example, today everybody gets spam e-mail that is trying to sell them some bogus weight loss product or some other product you would probably never buy. Spammers know almost 99% of people are going to immediately delete the e-mail however there is always somebody who is going to buy the product no matter how outrageous it may be.
Like most other subcultures, Internet Marketing starts off as a simple hobby; something interesting to do during their free time. Most Internet Marketers are very technology savvy as developing new innovative websites require extensive knowledge of computer coding such as HTML, PHP, Flash, and Java. The most popular way of getting together and communicating is done through online communities and message boards. These online communities allow people from all over the world to socialize, share ideas, methods, and beliefs. The biggest advantage of online gathering is how diverse it has allowed the subculture to become. People of all ages from all over the world are discovering these online marketing communities, researching methods, and becoming part of the subculture. Currently males mostly dominate these communities however women are quickly catching on to the craze. Unlike other subcultures we have studied which have a very specific style and taste, Internet Marketers can have any style. People are not judged based off of how they act or what they may believe in but rather how they treat others.
Basically, the internet marketing ideology is quite simple and remains unchanged since its development over two decades ago. Certainly, the goal of most marketers is to make an online salary they can comfortably live off of. Since this subculture is new and mostly unknown by the average American, it grows almost exclusively via the internet. Internet Marketing methods and techniques are mostly self-taught from guides that other marketers either sell or post to the internet and through simple trial and error. The traditional media has recently started to realize the huge potential of advertising online as well. For example, Comcast and NBC are now forcing viewers on Hulu to sit through lengthy commercials and say that “the growth that we are seeing in online advertising and digital in general, having these kind of positions, we think, is real scale and real growth opportunity in the future”.[3]
However, like most fields in business Internet Marketing has become highly competitive and people are starting to play dirty. Certain classes of people will always be more profitably than others and marketers are tending to exploit this by using their weaknesses against them. There is now an entire community named BlackHatWorld dedicated to making money online in ways that may be less than moral. For this research paper I was determined to finding out the boundaries of marketers on the internet. What kind of people do they target and what makes them different? Should there be more laws and regulations to control internet content?
[1] Internet World Stats
[2] 8% of Internet Users Account for 85% of all Clicks
[3] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/03/comcast-and-ge-on-hulu-tv-everywhere/