THE INTERNET IS NOT ONLY A TOOL; IT'S ALSO AN ENVIRONMENT, PART 1
BY DAVID STEIN
No longer the stuff of science fiction, cyberspace has become a reality within which we live at least part of our personal and professional lives. While that reality often appears boundless, however, it's in fact measurable. According to a recent New York Times article, a company called Alexa Internet estimates that the web is about three terabytes, or three trillion bytes, in size. That's about 5,000 CD-ROMs worth of data, more than you or I could ever use, but still small enough to fit on some of the more
powerful servers on the market. The Internet, in other words, only feels like it has no boundaries; it is actually finite.
Nonetheless, what might be called "the laws of Internet reality" work very differently from those that govern the physical reality in which we live and breathe. Distance on the Internet, for example, can be turned inside out: A desktop PC in New York can be connected to a web site in Katmandu with a
single click of the mouse. Along the same lines, the e-mail you send to your next door neighbor may have to travel through phone lines halfway around the world before it is delivered.
How these different "laws of reality" will change the way people live, or, more fundamentally, how they will change the way we think about the way we live, is a question that philosophers will be pondering for many years to come. For small business owners, the question's much simpler: "What do the
Internet's different 'laws of reality' mean to my bottom line?" On one level, the answer here is also simple, and it's been repeated over and over again by everyone from the guy down the street trying to sell you a web site to Vice President Al Gore singing the praises of e-commerce and globalization. Through the Internet, businesses can reach more people in more places, streamline operations, increase productivity, and sell more products — in many cases for less than it costs in the world of brick and mortar.
True as this statement may be, and I am one of those who say it the loudest, it is also narrow, focusing on the Internet as a medium either for building customer relationships or reorganizing internal business systems. It doesn't address the kinds of relationships established between and among companies simply by virtue of their being on-line. It's tempting, of course, to see those relationships in terms of another mantra, specifically that the Internet offers a level playing field on which smaller businesses can, with some hope of success, compete with larger ones.
BIG BUSINESS VS SMALL
Yet this response also overlooks something. The Internet can only be a level playing field to the degree that there remains some realm of cyberspace that large companies cannot buy for their own advertising purposes, effectively shutting out their smaller competitors. Till now, search engines have been that realm, ranking results in ways that excluded the possibility of one company buying outright the rankings it receives. According to another Times article, however, at least one search engine, Alta Vista, has started inviting advertisers who wish to be listed at the top of search results to pay for that privilege, thus blurring the all important distinction between the objectivity of its search results and the preferential treatment given to advertisers in terms of screen placement.
This change in policy should alarm small business owners no matter how fervently the search engine's executives insist the paid-for rankings will be clearly marked as advertisements and therefore will not undermine the ostensible objectivity of the results. For example, if you're a local florist in Melville, Long Island, and 1-800-FLOWERS is one of your competitors, it doesn't matter that the person searching for "florists in Melville" will see, say, a red box around the www.1800flowers.com at the top of the list, designating it as an advertisement. You'll still be going head to head against a much larger and more powerful company in a way that you might not have had to do if that ranking hadn't been for sale.
Alta Vista's decision to sell rankings is largely a response to market pressures. Like other on-line companies, it needs to increase revenues and justify the high valuation of its stock, which suggests that other search engines are likely to follow suit. This means search engines may soon cease to be a path you can count on to bring prospects and customers to your site, which means you need to develop other strategies for doing so. In the coming months, we'll look at what some of those strategies might be.
David Stein is president of Automatic On-Line System, a full service web design, marketing and maintenance company. He can be reached at (718) 361-3091 or by e-mail at internetdoctor@autoonline.net.