CReATION: Banner ads effective only on sites with relevant content targeted at specific people

L. Gordon Crovitz, senior vice-president of Dow Jones Electronic Publishing, has attempted to put an end to the debate over whether banner ads work. He said that banner ads were effective when there was a great deal of qualitative information about people visiting certain sites. At WSJ.com, for instance, he said: "We have the largest subscription site on the Internet and from that we can obtain very detailed demographic and psychographic information which we can share with advertisers in aggregate form. "As a result of this, we are able to charge twice the rate of other sites." He added that the success or failure of banner ads depended on the quality of the traffic through that site: "whether it was your target group of people coming back to your site on a regular basis or your target group of people who went to the site just once and never returned; the former means success and the latter failure". One reason why WSJ.com has been so successful has been because editorial content has been made relevant to its readers and delivered in a timely fashion. "People subscribe because they see that this is for me and since they are subscribers they will visit our site every day to get the information they need. Under this scenario, we can safely say that the banner ad works," Mr Crovitz told MEDIA. In 1999, WSJ.com pulled in a revenue of about US$31 million on a worldwide basis, with 60 per cent of that figure accounted for by advertising and the remainder by subscriptions. The Asia portion represents a small part of the whole. Mr Crovitz predicted that worldwide revenue would double this year from 1999.

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