According to Nucleus Research Inc., U.S. businesses have more than $71 billion each year in lost of productivity caused by spam management. This cost turn to be $712 per employee. The average employee spends about 7.3 minutes per week filtering the spam and looking through it. Spam results in productivity losses, storage wastage, and extra costs from anti-spam technologies and its maintenance.

It is surprising how many people and businesses become victims of the spam. A good illustration of business fraud is the example of Erica Shames’ case. She had her small business, and received an offer from one campaign saying that she could send email to 250,000 people for only $199. This offer resulted in about 10 new subscriptions for her regional magazine and close to 400 complaints from people who were angry their email addresses were used and send letters to Internet Service Providers about that spam advertising. That is the case that although email advertising and spam are cheap, the inappropriate use of those could result in much higher costs for the owner.

It is important to understand how email marketing works in order to make business successful. There are the techniques that could be learnt, which could make email look better and to prevent it to be deleted even before opening. Some of the tips include quality opt-out database (managing existing traffic and double opt out options), segmenting database, timely and relevant messages, and advanced technology. Basically, the challenges that businesses are facing are how to reduce the amount spam they receive daily and how to make sure that the emails that are sent out do not sound and look like spam.

A good example of the company that actively uses behavioral targeting is Amazon.com. When only entering the website for the first time, it seems already to offer the items for sale targeting based on the most often choices of your age group. When you research anything, for example, a certain book, this book with related to it potential purchases will be ones of the first to pop up on the page your next visits.

One of the biggest concerns associated with behavioral targeting nowadays is privacy issues. Behavioral targeting means that each of our action online, each our blog can be tracked and added to our profile. If this information leaks or is sold to the employers, for example, this can significantly affect our future.

Google itself is also launching Behavioral Targeting Ad program. For those people who are really concerned about their online privacy, Google also introduced Advertising Cookie Opt-Out Plug-in. This advertising cookie allows people to keep their status inactive for particular browsers. Users are also encouraged to clear cookies on their computers regularly.

I personally do not mind all my purchases and researched topic being recorded and used for the marketing purposes, I could possibly even benefit from offerings that I am interested in. The only concern is how detailed the profile is. The example that Jack Myers and Mark Ghuneim give during their presentation is about smoking. If one says to their employers that they have never smoked in their lives, and then ones on their Facebook profile they mentioned they are out for smoking, this information could mean you are simply lying. So, we should be really careful about what our Internet activities are as when the information gets on the web, it can stay there forever

  Click fraud refers to the false click on the advertising that results in the money loss for the company. Click fraud occurs in three different forms: 1) when competitors click the advertising repeatedly to increase a company’s expenses; 2) when website owners click on the advertising to increase their profits at a company’s expense; and 3) when people show obsessive shopping comparison behavior, which is going back and forth the website of competitors in order to make sure what and where to buy (each time they come back and click on the advertising, this results in an extra cost).

  According to the data of 2008, the overall click fraud average was 16.2%, and the countries who had the greatest percentage of click fraud outside North America were China, Russia, and France. If we can picture a big company that spends decent amount of money on web advertising, it is easy to visualize that the click fraud percentage could result in a significant loss. 

  It is hard to get rid of the click fraud completely, and there are people who believe that companies should account on such kinds of expenses the same way as they account on certain percentage of the shoplifting in physical stores. Click fraud will not disappear completely as long as there will be people willing to steal.

  An interesting case that caught attention from public and alerted industries about the fraud danger was the case of Michael Anthony Bradley who developed the program called “Google Clique”. The program allowed clicking on pay-per-click-ads and be absolutely undetected by search engines. Mr. Bradley wanted Google to buy this program from him for $100,000, otherwise he would send the program to spammers which would result in approximately $5 million losses only within first 6 months.  

  For the companies operating and advertising online, it is important to be aware of click fraud, to know that search engines cannot guarantee a complete protection from it (many cases of search engines being sued are good examples for that), and to take actions towards eliminating click fraud by investing and developing programs and analysis that help to detect and prevent online fraud.

  Search engines service reflects the work of many people involved in the search engine companies. In order to be competitive and get more users, search engines have to think of adding value to the users. Some of the popular search engines are Google and Yahoo. Google gets higher popularity because of people’s loyalty, easiness of search, additional features such as Google map and navigators, currency exchanges, etc. Yahoo tries to differentiate itself by providing an option that from the search box users can go directly to their emails and by providing local access to the maps, for example, if users choose local option, and then enter Starbucks, then the map will show all Starbucks around the users’ location. Some of the new search engines, such as Bing, provide some additional feature, for example, when there are websites displayed after the search, there is the column on the right that gives the summary of the website. This feature helps people see what the website is about, help them to avoid clicking on the wrong sites and, therefore, makes the search easier and faster. An interesting service provides Blind Search website, when entering the search word, the website provides three different results from different search engines. Users can vote for the one that they find the most useful and appropriate and then they get to find out which search engine they voted for.

  So, it is hard work to differentiate the search engines, make it easy to use and make it attractive for users, but this hard work could be highly rewarded as well. Google, for example, which is one of the most popular search engines, was created in 1998 and has close to 20,000 employees worldwide. Also, the firm got around $1.48bn in the three months to June, 30.

  By inputting so much money and importance on online promotion, it is interesting which type of advertising would be considered the most effective. Each day we see lots of different promotions even if we just check our emails, but which of them really do catch our attention.

  It gets sometimes hard to compare the effectiveness of different methods of advertising as usually the company would be using a combination of different types of ads and not providing just one kind. The studies made show that animated ads, pop-up ads, and interstitial ads scored with the highest visibility, but also happen to have the lowest click –through rates. Text ads seem to have the highest conversion rate, which could also occur after a couple of weeks after seeing the advertising. Marketers now are trying to reduce the “banner blindness” effect, where due to the increased volume of different advertising people just stop seeing and reacting on them. Too many ads, even if they are all good, can create negative experiences, and therefore, reduce the effectiveness. Text advertising seem to have highest conversion rate because people can get enough information to form an opinion about the advertising without interacting with it, they get enough information and then can decide whether they want to know more. While with the banner and pop-up advertising, it seems to be too interactive and is perceived as spam by many users.

  Video advertising are getting more popular nowadays, though, again, it is important not to make to disturb people. Internet video advertising has a unique opportunity to capture attention and to target a specific person’s interests, while TV advertising is missing this opportunity of targeting. It is still hard to measure the effectiveness of video advertising.

  So, in the majority of times, the most effective type of advertising will depend on the nature of the business and products or services, the users’ preferences and their mood.

   The most popular social network website would be Facebook that globally has about 67 million people registered. In terms of the number of Facebook users, Canada is on the third place; where the first place belongs to the U.S.A. and the second is to the UK. Users start to get tired of the amount of friends they have, to whom they might never have talked, and of the amount of various social network website, which all require new users to register and create profiles. Although, the number of the time spent on Facebook contradicts the fatigue issues. According to the Total Minutes Statistics, in comparison with 2008, in 2009 the time spent in Facebook increased by 700 %, while MySpace had a decrease by 31%, and Twitter showed an increase by 3,712%. It was estimated that the total minutes spent on Facebook for April 2009 accounted 13,872, 640,000 minutes. Right after the Facebook there is MySpace, which had 4,973,919,000 minutes for April.

   Facebook even has a limitation for the amount of friends people can have, which is 5,000, and limitation of groups people can join – 200, which resulted in some users’ complaints and protests. Imagine how much time a day people need to spend to actively keep 5,000 friends. It is interesting how addictive those websites can be and how many people still prefer to make fake connections and live online lives. Facebook and other social networks website addictions seem to be the cost and cultural trends of the new Internet era.

  It is interesting how much work going on behind the scene; so, when thinking about creating a website, all the salaries for people employed, research and design prices, and support should be taken into the consideration. Some successful websites, such as Facebook, takes up to $200,000,000 to run. I do believe that if a business wants to be successful in its e-presence, professional people need to be hired to design and maintain the website. There are so many websites nowadays and it became so easy to create the simplest one yourself, that there is a risen need of uniqueness and differentiation that pushes the owners to pay that much money.

  Talking about development countries, Internet advertising has much more potential to reach the target market successfully. As Internet usage increasing, I do believe that Internet advertising will be replacing the TV ones eventually. The reason of the successful rates Internet advertising reaches is web analytics that allows marketers to analyze the web behavior of people, their preferences, the items they most often look for on the web, the links they click; all this helps to target the web users and provide them with the advertisement that will have more effect on them. One of the most successful Internet advertisings, in my opinion, is the ones that included in the videos or shown as video on the side of the website. It becomes more common to watch movies or programs online, so short videos before the start of the movie does work well. It is important to make online advertising short and interactive; otherwise it will annoy the user more than deliver the needed message.

  Internet advertising has much more potential to reach the right people with the right message, but it is also makes it more costly, requires much more research to be done, and technologies applied in order to differentiate the people and the advertising going to each differentiated category. Of course, when comparing the success of Internet advertisements vs. TV ones, we need to consider different age and social groups, as well as countries.

More and more people nowadays do shopping online, and have the option to download movies, music, and books for free. I do believe that book publishing will experience slow turnovers in the future. I don’t think it will disappear, but it will be reduced significantly. Using the Internet it is possible to find any book you want, download it, and read from your laptop, which means you can have hundreds books on one device. Majority of us still prefer to read regular book, but online books are getting their popularity. A huge step in online book industry was made by introducing electronic book reader, which you can carry with you all the time, upload electronic books in it; some new versions of electronic readers, such as Kindle 2.0,  have a wireless access to up to 230, 000 books and have 16 shades of grey. The main benefits of electronic readers are their capacity, their size which matches to the standard size of the book, and the illumination of the screen is much less than the regular computers or laptops have, which makes it more comfortable for eyes to read. These factors make electronic books to be the closest to imitate the regular book.

  Another innovation that can affect the demand for published books is online libraries and online courses, where students just receive or buy the access key and then get their textbooks and other readings online. People want to be able to access studying materials at their own convenience, whether it is from the streets, from home, or from anywhere else on the planet. One of the examples of online library projects is Library at Stanford University of California, where with the help of Google they have already uploaded close to 8 million books for the online usage.   

  So, looking at all those rapid changes and developments, the increasing popularity of Internet usage and electronic books and online libraries usage, I would say that in the nearest future, as the new generation is coming, books publishing companies might need to search for alternatives and innovations to keep up in the market.