Online Advertising
By 1996 the practice of online advertising was becoming commonplace. As a general definition, advertising is defined as any openly sponsored offering of goods, services, or ideas through any medium of public communication. The most basic form of online advertising is a company's website. Here the potential buyer could have interaction with the company and its products and find information or directly purchase products or services from the website. But the company still has to get the potential buyers to go to their site. The earliest online advertisers distributed their information as widely as possible in a practice called 'spamming.' These were unsolicited email advertisements. As the internet became more sophisticated, so too did online advertising. With the internet's ability to display images, as well as its audio, video and interactive capabilities, it has provided a great opportunity for advertising. Some examples of online advertising include such things as banners, buttons, text links, and sponsorships. Much online advertising is sold in the same way as advertising in traditional media such as the print and broadcasting industries. Advertisers pay to place a small graphic, such as a banner, on a particular web page in a spot, usually at the top, where users are expected to see it clearly and click on it to follow the link to the advertiser's own site for more information. A home page is used to promote