In the future, advertisers may also spread the word by subsidizing people’s Net usage. They may say, “Look at our ads in e-mail and we’ll give you an hour’s free online time.”
Predictor: Godwin, Mike
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for The Boston Herald, Fawn Fitter writes about early attempts to target advertising to Internet users. She quotes Mike Godwin. Fitter writes:”While many commercial online services like CompuServe and Prodigy have built electronic shopping malls where virtual vendors peddle their wares, advertising your business on the Internet itself is a touchy subject. Originally, commercial messages were banned on the government-funded portions of the Net. Today, while they aren’t forbidden, they are still highly controversial. A practice [of advertising by using a technique] known as ‘spamming’ – posting a message to all 6,000 newsgroups at once – has infuriated longtime citizens of cyberspace. ‘The problem is not content, it’s the appropriateness of the forum where the ad appears,’ said Mike Godwin, staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which focuses on public interest and civil liberties issues as they relate to computer communications. ‘The value of newsgroups lies in their being organized by subject matter. “Spamming” is like reshelving all the books in a library – the information is there, but it’s impossible to find what’s valuable.’ Although indiscriminate salesmanship is frowned upon, there are still ways to advertise your business or services online without crossing the bounds of netiquette. The simplest way is to keep ads short and tasteful, indicate in their subject headers that they are advertisements, so people can skip them if they so choose, and post them only to appropriate groups … ‘In the future, advertisers may also spread the word by subsidizing people’s Net usage,’ Godwin said. ‘They may say, “Look at our ads in e-mail and we’ll give you an hour’s free online time,’ he said. ‘No one’s actually done it yet, but companies are thinking about it.'”
Biography:Mike Godwin was an attorney specializing in Internet issues and the outspoken chief counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the cyber-liberties organization in the 1990s. (Legislator/Politician/Lawyer.)
Date of prediction: July 25, 1994
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Advertising/PR
Name of publication: Boston Herald
Title, headline, chapter name: Hard Sell Hits Cyberspace: Renegade Advertisers Steamroll Internet Users
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=d05e365437a1f4c1b5a76da30ce79610&_docnum=10&wchp=dGLbVlb-lSlzV&_md5=fdb614ec34e3c6331c17b9f79558d576
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Johnson, Kathleen