Niche marketing is nothing new, It has been around since before I was born. However, it becomes much more important on the internet, as the growth of social networking continues. It is also working in entirely new ways that targets the consumer of social networking much better than the "old media" way of doing things. Television, radio, and print publications had limited means of targeting their audience. However, recently they have done a much better job of it. Looking at a television station, they can target the audience based on the content produced within a certain time frame. If the local news is on, the station can target local consumers with advertising for local business. On Saturday morning when cartoons are on, anxious young consumers find out about all the coolest new toys and fun places to be.
The beginning of web advertising was rough, though. When the web first got it's start as a consumer platform, getting "just any advertiser" was a very inefficient way of generating revenue. The web was full of static code. A company would pay for advertising on a specific page because they believed that the content of that page would appeal to potential customers. In these early days of the web, no one had really developed any better way of marketing. Google eventually came along with an outstanding advertising model, that has driven them into a company able to pull in $16.5 billion in revenue last year, coming mostly from advertising.
Google started by targeting search results, but eventually produced AdSense and AdWords. The concept of embedding code into a web page that would generate a random ad, based on the content of the page. This probably didn't seem important to too many people at its conception, because most of the web was still static. But now most of the pages we see are built from a template, with the content coming from a database. Google saw that coming, so they won.
That is in the web's past, but what about now? Consumers are now using the web for more than just finding information for their book report and shopping. Many of them store content of their lives on the web. This is happening in increasing numbers. I am talking about Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more. The information that the average Facebook user has on his or her profile is already enough for a much better advertising model what exists. This will bring local advertising to national websites. This is much better than the consumer getting local advertising with their local news. That already takes place on your local newspaper's website. Now you can get local advertising tailored to your interests based on the events you plan on attending, the friends you have, etc. This can be huge for the future. Looking at Twitter, the newest social phenomenon, businesses are already trying to find a way to reach their audience. Many companies are starting to follow tweeters hoping that they will automatically follow back. I'm not too sure how e
