Web based advertising is a real hot area in the present times. The legitimacy of advertising on the internet arises from the fast that most of net users are already familiar with advertisements on print and audio visual media. Hence, as the internet grew popular, it was expected that it would carry advertisements.

A particularly unique feature of the Web is its power to engage the user/viewer in a highly active or interactive message as compared to the passive marketing message of TV or magazine. The early web-based advertisement was just a Logo or a Banner of the sponsor of the web page which the surfer was viewing to extract some form of information from the internet.

Even now, this model is the most widely used one, in which the Corporate sponsor “pays” for the information that is available, instead of the “consumer” who accesses that information for his use. But this has recently evolved to much more effective and targeted form of advertising like online commercials, pop-ups, RSS feeds, e-newsletters, screensavers, downloads and so on and so forth.

Here, it is both, pertinent and interesting to mention what the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) assessed some times back. They say that the Internet advertising revenues for 2006 are estimated to exceed $12.5 billion, a 30% increase over the previous revenue record of $9.6 billion in 2005. The fourth quarter of 2005 revenues represent a 35 percent increase over the same period in 2004 and a 17 percent increase over Q3 of 2005 !

These phenomenal increases in the advertisement revenue in the present times, thus, make Web advertising a very powerful and unique opportunity both for the advertiser.

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