Keith,
Assume that that e-ad and direct e-marketing (email) was $4 billion in 1999.
The estimates I have at hand are that the the rate will be $18 billion in
2002. Roughly between now and 2005 the net's share of ads, regardless of the
delivery form, is going to increase six-fold -- according to my crystal ball.
There is a reason for this -- an unintended consequence of convience. The
primary mode of use (research, browsing and purchasing) leaves intent in
machine readable form, on dump tapes or click trails or ... and gratis our
integrated ordering, billing, and payment cycle the net has become (or has
been for some time already) a user-maintained transactional database. My
dad could get a smile out of this, as he did early retail point-of-payment
bar code systems, which married up not only with back-end inventory systems,
but also to payment systems.
I don't want to point a particular finger at http state-management (aka
"cookies") or any of a number of other techniques for extracting updates
of transactions. Which is "worst" may be interesting, and what and how to
illuminate users (rather than their transactions) is why I started the
cookie-cutters list -- it seems like a user-services thing to do, neh?
What I do want to point out is that there the direct e-mailers (Digital
Impact, MessageMedia, etc.) are not acting in isolation -- media buyers
like Avenue A and Mediaplex, also buy-side companies, sell-side companies,
whether portals, ad networks, or e-mail newsletters, and promotional
companies, all act in some way on transactional data. Which ever side of
the policy balloon gets squeezed, that is a lot of money looking to find
effective mechanisms, and no amount of dull ax work is going to undo the
crucial decision to unfund the public backbone and withdraw the restriction
on commercial use. We could have seen that one comming, neh?
Several years ago my friend Barry Shein started an effort to limit spam,
before banner ads or professional direct e-marketing, back when dorkage and
poor taste were the gravamen of the offense. As we know the general contours
of the future, we also know that trusting user interfaces, whether mailer
or browser, won't scale with the offered load. This is the IETF's problem
domain, regardless of what happens with HR 3113.
Cheers,
Eric
