New medium strikes gold
The question, of course, is how much mainstream patrons will put up with. Wallace and others have shown in their spam initiatives that they are more than willing to experiment with a relatively new medium--and their customers--for the chance to strike gold.
"We've been doing this practice for the last 12 months, and we're still in the top 100 (of measured Web sites). And we've been profitable for 12 months," Wallace said.
Unlike pop-up ads, which are not Web pages, full browser pages served by
JobsOnline and PassThisOn can be counted as "impressions"
"Marketers are like dogs: They jump up on top of you and try to lick you everywhere, and it's just painful to have to ward them off at every corner," said Jason Catlett, a privacy advocate with anti-spam group Junkbusters. "Surfers are an individually minded lot, so the marketers are using browser technology to extend and exploit that attention in ways that really annoy the consumer."
The issue also underscores the long-standing debate over how to count and use online traffic. Internet measurement companies often base their rankings on projections from a limited number of Web site visitors. The methodology, which is used to determine traffic on the entire Web, is frequently called into question but remains the closest thing to an accepted standard used by the industry.
JobsOnline shot to the top of the charts for traffic among employment-related Web sites in the second half of 2000. It still leads the pack and fluctuates in and out of the top 50 of all sites online.
According to PC Data, JobsOnline garners the most of its traffic, about 13
percent, from PassThisOn, which attracted 7.1 million unique visitors in
December
