Denial and the Ravaging of Cyberspace Back in the summer of 1993, "cyberspace had remained practically free of advertisements, but marketers were beginning to eye the medium." Eight years later, Weber wrote, "it's difficult to remember that quaint, commercial-free Internet. Marketers didn't just eye the medium -- they conquered it." He added: "The Internet has been transformed largely into a place of commerce."
But the Internet remains, for many, an object of illusion.
As if looking backward through the wrong end of a telescope, some observers are dazzled by the virtues of their personal treks online. But whatever cyber-stars are in the eyes of certain individuals, the business calculations of hard-nosed number crunchers are focused elsewhere. And the documented trends are enough to make the most avaricious media tycoon grin.
Websites operated by just four corporations account for 50.4 percent of the time that U.S. users of the Web are now spending online, the authoritative Jupiter Media Metrix research firm reported in early summer. At the top of the heap were AOL Time Warner's sites, with 32 percent of all minutes spent online in the nation, followed by Microsoft (7.5 percent) and Yahoo (7.2 percent).