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  3. Internet advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $ 9.6 billion in

Internet advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $ 9.6 billion in

游客2023-12-21  23
问题     Internet advertising is booming. The industry has gone from $ 9.6 billion in revenue in 2001 to $ 27 billion this year, according to Piper J affray, an investment bank. And it is still early days. The internet accounts for only 5% of total spending on advertising, but that figure is expected to reach at least 20% in the next few years. The single largest category within this flourishing industry, accounting for nearly half of all spending, is "pay-per-click’ advertising, which is used by firms both large and small to promote their wares.
    It works like this. Advertisers bid on keywords that they believe potential customers will be interested in. This enables Internet firms such as Google, the market leader, and Yahoo!, its smaller rival, to display advertisements alongside the results of Internet searches. Somebody searching for a particular type of wine, for example, might see advertisements from wine merchants. Google, Yahoo! and other firms also place ads on affiliates’ websites--so wine merchants’ advertisements might also appear on a wine-appreciation site. The advertiser pays only when a consumer clicks on an ad; the owner of the website where the ad was displayed then receives a small commission.
    The benefits of the pay-per-click approach over traditional advertising are obvious. Since advertisers pay only to reach the small subset who actually respond to an advertisement, the quality of the leads generated is very high, and advertisers are prepared to pay accordingly. The price per click varies from $ 0.10 to as much as $ 30, depending on the keyword, though the average is around $ 0.50.
    But as pay-per-click advertising has grown into a huge industry, concern has mounted over so-called "click fraud"--bogus clicks that do not come from genuinely interested customers. It takes two main forms. If you click repeatedly on the advertisements on your own website, or get other people or machines to do so on your behalf, you can generate a stream of bogus commissions. Click fraud can also be used by one company against another: clicking on a rival firm’s advertisements can saddle it with a huge bill. Bogus clicks are thought to account for around 10% of all click traffic, though nobody knows for sure.
    Bill Gross, the entrepreneur who pioneered the pay-per-click model back in 1998, was aware of the problem even then. He installed a three-layered defence system: a filter to weed out clicks from known fraudsters at the outset, statisticians and software to spot suspicious click patterns, and co-operation with advertisers to enable them to analyse the leads generated and sound the alarm if necessary.
    But generally the industry adopted a rather cavalier attitude to click fraud. Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, caused uproar a few months ago when he seemed to suggest that the "perfect economic solution" to click fraud was to "let it happen". He was responding to a theoretical question during a debate at Stanford University, but his response reinforced the perception that Google had higher priorities than addressing the problem.
    Such a flippant attitude has not gone down well with advertisers, who are up in arms about the problem. Some have even resorted to legal action. Google reached a settlement in March with Lane’s Gifts and Collectibles, a gift shop based in Arkansas, and agreed to offer refunds to advertisers who claim they have been charged for bogus clicks. Such refunds are capped at $ 90m, however, so many observers think Google got off lightly. And in June Yahoo! promised to intensify its efforts to fight click fraud as part of a settlement with CheckMate, a fraud-detection firm. As well as offering refunds for clicks determined to be fraudulent, Yahoo! agreed to appoint a "traffic-quality advocate" to voice advertisers’ concerns within the company.
    In the wake of these legal challenges, Google and Yahoo! recently joined a working group at the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which will establish standards for pay-per-click advertising, including the introduction of industry-funded auditing and certification, by the middle of 2009. "I believe Google and Yahoo! are now taking the issue very seriously," says David Jones, chief executive of Euro RSCG, an advertising company. But Rishad Tobaccowala, head of innovation at Publicis, one of the world’s biggest advertising groups, says it is too early to say whether the measures being taken against click fraud will be Enough to satisfy advertisers.
选项 A、Internet advertising is very promising and profitable.
B、Internet advertising is newly-developed and problematic.
C、whether Internet advertising will grow remains a question.
D、people cannot predict the future of Internet advertising.
答案 A
解析 本题是推断题。由题干定位至首段。首段指出互联网广告业的发展势头：正在蓬勃发展。之后用数据“该产业的收入已从2001年的96亿美元增加到今年的270亿美元”引出“这才刚刚开始”这句话。之后又指出：互联网广告投入仅占广告业总投入的5%，但今后几年该比例有望至少达到20%。可见，“And it is still early days．”是其上下句之间的过渡句，起到承上启下的作用，由下文可知，互联网广告业将蓬勃发展，利润丰厚，故[A]为答案。这里没有提到该行业存在的问题，排除[B]。本段也没有提及人们对该行业发展前景的质疑或对行业前景的不确定，排除[C]和[D]。
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