Other Issues in Commercial Aspects of the Web
The World Wide Web is full of commercialization; there are numerous aspects of business and capitalization that have made the Web what it is today. From its roots as an information-transfer medium the Web has grown beyond its initial scope as a messaging system to a complete world-wide marketplace of ideas, industries and products ranging from advertising to online auction sites. Search engines have become commercialized by offering paid-for spots on pages of search results. Most Internet service providers have advertising on home pages and pop-up screens. In fact it is perhaps difficult to surf the Web without encountering some sort of commercial aspect, even in routine research and browsing.
Kuk and Yeung(2002) consider the Internet “to have become commercial since 1994, when companies began investing in e-commerce Web sites.” Since then, nearly every organization that stands to make a profit now has a Web presence; you can find just about everything on the Web that you can in the stores. Chiang states that “the online market offers consumers vast opportunities because it reduces physical efforts of information search and provides access to a large amount of information and choices. (Chiang 2006)” Some people may question “why even leave home, I have Web access?” “In the dot-com boom, William Shatner's ubiquitous "This changes everything" ads for Priceline.com became symbolic of the creative destruction that e-commerce wreaked on traditional business. (Jaskiewics 2006).” Sites such as Amazon.com offer products ranging from books to electronics and tools, and sites such as E-Bay offer personal items for sale as well as commercial products all in an online-auction format. Considering the search engine giant Google and online music superstore Apple’s i-tunes, Lashinsky says “Google isn't merely a ubiquitous (and free) research tool, though it certainly is that. Google, the online advertising company, generates billions of dollars in profits…. The iTunes Music Store has sold more than a billion songs online in the past three years (Lashinsky et.al 2006).” The Web as a marketplace generating mega money is certainly a current reality. Considering the effect of the Internet on consumerism, Chiang argues “the Internet has transformed consumer behavior in two ways: (1) by transforming consumers into online shoppers requiring the use of computers and (2) by transforming physical stores into an online market space that is information technology intensive (Chiang 2006).”
Authors Stewart et al. explain the development of the Web into a commercial fulcrum: “From its origins as an American military-academic project in the 1960s to its present form as a worldwide, decentralized, and primarily commercial web of networks, two dominant forces have driven the evolution of the Internet. One of them has been the global expansion of institutional, financial and corporate activities, which has brought about a need for reliable infrastructure and capacities to support international data flows. The other has been the confluence of institutional (e.g. government, education, healthcare) and personal spheres of human interaction that rely on the ubiquity and instantaneous nature of the Internet for the sharing of knowledge and resources, and the maintenance of different communities of interests. From the interplay of these two forces, the Internet has emerged as a dynamic space, a reality reflected in a growing and multi-dimensional set of phenomena, which are comprised under the generic term of cyberspace. In this environment, new forms of human interaction and coexistence have also emerged, such as chatrooms, newsgroups, telemedicine and distance education, to name just a few (Stewart et al. 2004).”
This influx of commercialism spurred by growing industrial firms’ Web presence is noted by some as a hailed achievement of capitalization and economic boom. Kraemer states that “globalization leads to both greater scope of e-commerce use and improved [firm] performance, measured as efficiency, coordination, and market impacts (Kraemer 2005).” Such growth is explained by Lashinsky: “Driving this transformation is the extraordinary growth in the number of people with access to high-speed Internet connections. In 2000 just five million Americans had fast Internet access at home. At the end of 2005 that figure was 73 million, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Those speedy connections have supercharged the online experience, and people are doing exactly what you'd expect: spending vast amounts of time with their eyes glued to computer screens. More important, companies have finally figured out the long-sought key to "monetizing" those eyeballs, mainly by selling advertising, but also by charging for music and video downloads, not to mention for the access itself. (Lashinsky et.al. 2006).”
After the first dot-com boom in the mid-90s, investors took a heavy blow from many Web site failures; some argue that the Web is on the verge of another boom—“venture capitalists are indeed breathing air into something of a bubble for the so-called Web 2.0. (That's a catchall name for the blitz of companies running websites like del.icio.us and Writely that make it easy for users to create their own content online and then share it with others.) In Boom 1.0, any company with buzz and a business plan rushed to go public long before it had any profits. Now standards for IPOs are higher. And with tough reporting requirements imposed by the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance law, fewer companies are even attempting to go public. (Lashinsky et.al 2006).” In studying current market trends in Web commercialism, Okazaki and Alonso argue that “more and more multinational corporations are drastically shifting from off-line to on-line selling by creating a diverse range of websites in multiple markets. By 2001 more than 36 million domains had been created for commercial websites (‘dot coms’)….the Internet can thus be seen as key to the ‘global village wonderland’, enabling more standardized marketing communications in an interconnected world market based on communication technology; product-based websites are replacing traditional off-line shopping venues, such as mail order catalogues and television-based home shopping, while hosting a new form of global advertising among culturally and linguistically diverse groups. Furthermore, an increase in the quantity as well as the quality of product and brand information on the Internet is generating greater interest among consumers, extending beyond physical boundaries websites are asserted as the best communication medium for developing a standardized brand image by uniformly blending textual and visual content (Okazaki, Alonso 2003).” According to Chiang, “the Internet has joined other traditional media and become a major source of information for many products and services for consumers because of its abundance of information and convenience (Chiang 2006).” One of the benefits from commercial growth on the Web is having so much information about products and prices that consumers are becoming more shopping savvy—an earlier study of the Web indicated “The explosive growth of the Internet promises a new age of perfectly competitive markets. With perfect information about prices and products at their fingertips, consumers can quickly and easily find the best deals. In this brave new world, retailers’ profit margins will be competed away, as they are all forced to price at cost (‘‘Frictions in Cyberspace’’, The Economist, 20th November, 1999, p. 112).”
Companies have taken notice of the impact of the Web on their profit margins; the importance of a Web presence is a key ingredient to contemporary business communication. As noted by Pollach, “Corporate web sites have become powerful tools for promoting corporate identities and building relationships with audiences. Corporate web sites are superior to traditional mass media in several respects. First, the WWW is capable of transmitting an unlimited amount of information to all potential audiences, including customers, vendors, employees, job seekers, investors, financial analysts, journalists, students, researchers and the public at large (Sharp, 2001). Further, the WWW is a pull medium, which means that audiences have much more control over what they want to see than in traditional media (Gallagher et al., 2001). They are active information seekers and thus process the information they find more effectively than audiences reached via traditional mass media (Esrock and Leichty, 1998). Also, the messages companies send to their audiences are not filtered by gatekeepers but are controlled exclusively by the companies themselves (White and Raman, 1999). Ultimately, the WWW enables companies to learn more about their audiences by including interactive features on their web sites to encourage visitors to enter into a dialogue with the company (Hurme, 2001). Although the WWW offers tremendous opportunities for corporate self-presentation and image management, it also poses a number of challenges for corporate web sites, including the usability of the site, the credibility of the message, and the value of the content (Pollach 2005).”
At the very heart of the commercialization of the Web is the ability to transfer funds electronically. Banks have grown tremendously since their adoption of electronic banking techniques that can offer services to clients and users around the world. Nath, Schrick and Parzinger (2001) state that “New business models are replacing outdated ones and organizations are rethinking business process designs and customer relationship management strategies.” This in turn has changed the way people bank and do business with each other, be it personally or electronically. Also, according to Pereira “the Internet can reduce the cost of observing prices. According to an estimate, finding a high interest rate certificate of deposit requires 25 minutes using the telephone, 10 minutes using the Internet, and less than a minute using a price comparison search engine (Pereira 2005).” The Web has taken away time constraints and distance barriers to commerce and finance and has allowed people to have access to their funds and investments in more ways than ever before, while opening up new channels of consumerism and globalization.
Authors Stewart et al. note that the primary function has been skewed from its original intent to a focal point of capitalism that is getting away from user centralization and moving towards a commercial marketplace that offers less interactivity; Stewart claims that the Web should operate more like a public park instead of a shopping mall or advertising forum. In critique of some of the commercial aspects of the Web, Stewart states: “The development of the Internet seems in many ways to emulate both the emergent process and resulting form of the industrial city. The evolution of the Internet is complex and dynamic as it reflects the competing demands of the many publics it serves. As a result, the Internet has become the modern day battleground for competing needs of the public and private sectors as the industrial age city. However, policy making regarding online activities remains focused on the market-related aspects of the Internet.” Stewart goes on to explain the weakening of the public’s power over the Internet and how commercialism may be going too far—“There is an illusion of interactivity and participation on the Internet. That is, everyone who has access to the Internet feels he or she is a potential content provider because of the possibility of creating a personal home page. But in an increasingly commercialized cyberspace, this is an illusion of participation without weight, a fallacy about the ability of voicing one's message without the resources of actually being heard. This is particularly true for those individual Internet users who, having achieved access, cannot afford the costs of being easily reachable through the most popular search engines such as Yahoo!, Google or AOL (Mariano 2001; Sullivan 2002)…… the only way to materialize the promises of the Internet as a democratic medium, where everybody enjoys equality as both receptor and provider of contents, is by allowing users to develop a true sense of ownership over this environment. Through play, exploration and experimentation in settings that are not (commercially or otherwise) predefined, users can do their own reading and appropriation of the Internet without the noise and coercions imposed by spaces driven by particular interests or purposes (Stewart, et al. 2004).”
Advertisers are finding it more difficult to determine pricing techniques, since some methods such as click counting (counting the number of hits on an advertisement) have fallen to scams and sabotage such as click fraud. This paradox is explained by Kitts: “Whether customers are uninterested, fraudulent or like clicking on advertisements because they're not familiar with the Internet, the solution for advertisers is the same. They need to avoid showing their advertisements to those customers (Kitts et.al. 2006).” Pollach in turn argues that marketing efforts on the Web should be focused on targeted audiences by honing in on consumer needs, stating— “companies need to make more efforts to help users find what they are looking for and at the same time entice them to see pages they would otherwise not choose to see (Pollach 2005).”
In a short essay by Tim Berners-Lee about his personal history with the Web he stated that “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information(Berners-Lee, 1998).” Nobody wants the Web to turn into a television, a book or a movie; the greatness of the Web is its interactivity and our ability to filter information at our own discretion. Watching television, the viewer is part of a captive audience, one where we are subject to commercials and time constraints. As a Web surfer, a user can block pop ups and chat with other users while viewing multiple pages at once. The Web has developed beyond sharing information to sharing resources and knowledge. This makes the Web a valuable medium, which is unsurpassed by its outreach to the world community. The Web is now a global library, meeting place and marketplace; by using the Web we are contributing to the development of an electronic society and economy.
Last Updated: April 26, 2006
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