Web 2.0 Assessment

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 was founded in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci and was later made popular several years later by Tim O'Reilly. The idea of Web 2.0 was that it would offer a wider variety of resources including the beginning of social media. Advertising used to always be above the line advertising which basically means it wasn't targeted towards a particular group and goes off the basis that is enough people see it then some people are bound to be interested in it . Web 2.0 brought in below the line advertising where companies could strategically place their ads on social media or the web in order to have them more targeted towards the audience they are looking for. This in my opinion made advertising much easier since you car reach your target audience effectively.

An example of below the line adverting through social media is sponsored snapchat filters. One of the most recent and most popular sponsored snapchat filters is a filter made for latest Marvel movie Venom. With 158 million people using snapchat everyday and on average opening opening the app 18 times a day the Venom snapchat got a lot of advertising. The reason that this is an example of below the line advertising is because the vast majority of snapchats audience are teenagers or young adults. This happens to be there same target audience that the Venom movie has, therefore Sony deliberately chose to advertise their new movie on snapchat since a lot of people that fit the target audience would see it. 

Another way in which Web 2.0 opened up new below the line advertising opportunities is through the use of pop-up web adverts. These adverts are small little pop-ups you get when you are searching on google, browsing on Amazon etc. During the beginning of when pop-up adverts started they were very effective because they were very in your face and hard to miss. This along with the fact that cookies were used made them very effective in the beginning. Accepting cookies form a site is basically allowing them too use your data and hold on to it, they use this data to tailor adverts to you depending on what you have been searching for or watching. This is an example of below the line advertising because they are targeted towards you personally, your data can also be sold off to other sites which can also use it to tailor adverts to you. The issue is with these adverts is that people have seen them so much that they are used to ignoring them without really even checking them. 

Video games are an ever growing part of media and with that comes people watching video games. Twitch is a video game streaming site in which people play games and stream them to others watching. Twitch was recently sold to Amazon in a massive billion dollar deal, this shows that video games are are very large part of media and are only growing. Twitch has adverts at the beginning of streams and sometimes throughout. These adverts are usually about other games or game related products, this is because people watching games will obviously quite likely have an interest in games.  This is an example of below the line advertising because it is targeted towards a specific audience based on their interests.