Journal of Advertising Research
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The Once and Future Web: Scenarios for Advertisers
Scott C. McDonald
Time Warner Inc.
The form and nature of content, including advertising content, on the Web has been constrained by the bandwidth limitations of the existing Internet "pipeline"-the telephone system. As competition from alternative pipelines accelerates in the coming years, content will adjust accordingly, evolving eventually into formats more akin to contemporary television. This article reviews the state of current competition to build broadband pipelines and concludes that, in the end, there will be multiple pipelines and continued fierce competition in the Internet access business. It also proposes several likely scenarios for near-term and longer-term future of ad-supported Web sites.
Sitting here, early in 1997, the "new media landscape" looks quite different from what it was five, or even three years ago. By early 1992, many observers had already predicted that severe competition would develop around the delivery of broadband services (e.g., Neuman, 1991) and that a convergence of media would be driven by digitization (e.g., Pool, 1990), but no one anticipated the emergence of the narrowband Internet as the primary vehicle for new media development. Yet the rapid growth in 1994 and 1995 of user-friendly proprietary on-line services like Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online demonstrated that there was a mass consumer market for computer-based communication over a large-area network. With the development of an open-standards hypertext markup language (HTML) in 1992 and the free distribution of the Mosaic browser in 1994, the World Wide Web took off. Its growth since then has been nothing less than breathtaking, with Web sites and Web users proliferating and with all segments of the advertising, media, and research communities scrambling to understand and benefit from that explosive growth.
In this article, I will consider what the growth of the Web means for advertising and for advertising-based media. I shall do so by invoking a somewhat unusual model for thinking about the subject-the notion of base and superstructure. In this decade following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it may be regarded as foolish to invoke a construct that has its intellectual roots in the Marxist economic theory of state and society, but I'll take that risk because I think that the concept of base and superstructure can illuminate the relationship between new technologies and their social effects. The original Marxian version distinguishes between the "base" of society, held to be the economic components that generate jobs and wealth, and the "superstructure" of ideas, laws, conventions, and ideologies; to the Marxist, the two are thought to be dialectically interrelated, but with developments in the base determining developments in the superstructure. Though in the 1990s that simplified schema has been largely discredited as a guide to predicting the evolution of societal change, there may be some merit in borrowing the distinction between base and superstructure for thinking about new media. In the present context, the "base" for the new media is the fundamental technology: the hardware, software, and communication pipelines which enable computers to talk to each other. By contrast the "superstructure" is the content itself: the words, images, and advertising messages that are relayed over the communication networks at the "base." I invoke this notion of base and superstructure because there is a dynamic (dare we say dialectical?) relationship between developments in the fundamental technologies and the developments in Web-based advertising; and to some extent, developments in new media superstructure (content, advertising, etc.) can only go as fast as developments in the technological base permit. Thus, it is not wise to divorce. . .