NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS> VRML Banner Advertising
Re: ONLINE-ADS> VRML Banner Advertising
Glenn Fleishman (glenn_at_popco.com)
Mon, 6 Oct 1997 12:14:02 -0700
>From: Kim Northrop <kimn_at_MPGN.COM>
>--Not speaking directly about VRML, but in my opinion this research speaks
>to the issues of adopted technologies and the value of time for web surfers.
>Are people coming to a site for information or entertainment? And how long
>will they wait to be entertained? I saw another survey recently that
>concluded that for every 5 seconds it took for information to load the site
>lost 12%-20% of it's viewers.
I thought I'd share a few thoughts on this front.
First, I spoke to a guy on the technology team at _at_Home when he was
speaking at the Web Broadcasting conference in June, and privately and
onstage, he emphasized that bandwidth bottlenecks are often server based.
He said that whenever Netscape added a new server to its distributed farm
they increased daily "hits" (not visits) by about two million. He also
pointed out similar increases at other companies.
His pithiest remark: if someone's going to spend five minutes at your site,
they can view 2 pages or 7 pages. That's really a server speed issue - some
of it's latency, but I rarely get full bandwidth off a site, and that's not
a problem on my end (I can test this by getting full bandwidth at sites I
help run).
The other thought had to do with InterVU. I met with representatives from
the company the other day, and one message they delivered hit home. Their
focus is strictly on delivering video, but they use JavaScript to determine
the best way they can send it. If the browser doesn't support JS, they send
GIFs. If it does, they send the best format depending plug-in. What's
clever about that, beyond the technical part, is you have to assume that if
someone installs Shockwave or QuickTime or MPEG2 or Intel video or
whatever, that they're somewhat more predisposed to SEEING things in those
formats. So it's an indirect targeting by media type as well.
This is certainly a big problem with media that doesn't target: that just
offers a link to a media type you can't use, including VRML. VRML may be
cool, but until millions of folks have it pre-installed for them and then
don't disable it because it takes memory, makes their machine sluggish, or
just doesn't interest them, it's not going to catch on in the least.
Glenn
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Glenn Fleishman, unsolicited pundit. see my mug: http://www.glenns.org
editor in chief, NetBITS, an electronic journal: http://www.netbits.net
writer, perl hacker, Adobe Magazine columnist/editor . fax 206.285.0308
currently working on the book "Real World Scanning & Halftones," 2nd ed.
conference chair, Web Advertising '98 http://www.thunderlizard.com/webad
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