Compared with the latest form of web advertising, however, banner ads and buttons and sponsorships are beginning to look a little passé. The latest thing is bigger, more animated, and, of course, more insidious than the banner ad. It is call an interstitial, and it's a form of web advertising that jumps onto your screen between the time you call up a new page (unrelated to any ad) and the time that new page appears. Interstitials are not prompted by any direct click on the part of the surfer. Yet they are effective because they are able to take up your computer screen, to the exclusion of anything else. They have a limited chink of time within which they can appear (usually five to ten seconds), but that's often enough to grab the viewer's attention and prompt him to click on something within the interstitial -- and then the interstitial has done its job. A smaller cousin of the interstitial is something called a daughter window. The daughter window pops up once the page you've requested has appeared. It doesn't take up the entire screen (typically one-eighth, in fact), but its unprompted appearance makes it akin to the interstitial.

So what is the price of all this selling? If websites earn their bits and bytes through advertising, how exactly do they bill the companies that dish out the persuasive stuff? The most common method of tallying how much an advertiser owes the host site is the cost-per-click (CPC) rate. This means an advertisement can appear on the website for free until the surfer clicks on it. Once clicked upon, the banner or button earns the host a little bit of cash. Another billing method depends on the number of "impressions," or the number of unique surfers that visit a particular website (which website, of course, includes the ad in question). A more precise method of this type of tally is called the "page view," which stipulates that the website had to be downloaded with all its graphics intact for the host company to receive credit for it (since many surfers lack the sophisticated software that would enable them to view all graphics and hear all sounds that appear in today's costly e-commercials).

All these methods are generally tallied on a CPM, or cost per mille (i.e., thousand), basis. This means that a fixed rate is attached to every thousand cost-per-clicks, or every thousand page views, as the case may be. So far, these standards have made the internet an advertisement-saturated environment. Even so, however, advertising dollars spent on the web in 1999 only amounted to 6.5% of all advertising expenditures. That number may have been an 135% increase from the previous year, but it still cannot compete with the values that are pumped into television, radio, billboard, and other media on a regular basis. The fact that the internet has so far to go before it competes with more traditional forms of advertisement confirms it as a medium of wild potential. The Wild West was similarly dwarfed in terms of funds, standards and culture back before it became the most powerful hemisphere on the planet.