This article was authored by
Debra Littlejohn Shinder
TANSTAAFL. Robert A. Heinlein, one of my favorite sci-fi
writers, and Milton Friedman, one of my favorite economists, made
this concept famous decades ago. It stands, of course, for
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. That's
as true today as it was back then.
Whether you're talking about "free" government
handouts or "free" Internet content, somebody has to pay
for it. In the case of the latter, that somebody is the advertisers
who make it possible for sites to operate without going
broke. Advertising is a fact of life on most websites today,
but not all advertising is created equal – and on many sites,
the ads have gotten completely out of hand. It's no
longer just annoying; it's rendering those sites completely
unusable, which is bound to eventually have the opposite of the
intended effect. In this article, I want to take a look at the
evolution of webvertising, the types of ads that are
