Into the big abyss

It doesn't quite make sense and no one is just quite sure how it works, but despite the enigma of its form and type, online advertising is steadily plodding along in a globalising city. Yasmine El-Rashidi tries to grasp the concept and figure out why it will tick when much Internet-else failed
It doesn't seem so long ago since the advent of the Internet hit the city by storm. First it was e-mail and the wonder of the World Wide Web, and shortly thereafter came online buying, browsing, and booking.
Like all new things, though, the fizzle seemed to fade. For a while that is. A little bit later -- just as the great dot.bomb phenomenon hit the United States -- the next Internet big bang cruised into Cairo. 'Portal' was the buzzword.
They promised to have it all. Endless pages of original, top-quality, ground-breaking reporting and writing; thousands and thousands and thousands of products and gadgets and luxuries to purchase online; and access to every ticket, seat, and reservation for every movie, event or concert in the city.
The Internet Portal revolution was mapped out to cut through the city like a ten-lane highway; speed, noise, and all. That was the plan, at least.
"They were too early for the market," says Samer El- Gamal, director of content for Connect Ads, Egypt's sole online advertising agency, and the soon-to-be launched MSN Arabia. "And the expectations were overestimated. Especially for such a young market."
This time, El-Gamal says, things are going to be different.
The Internet hot word, this time, is "online advertising." The hype? Definitely growing.
"Online advertising is a big market," El-Gamal says. "The challenge is getting it right."
Getting it right in terms of style and design, concept and conceivability, clients and culture. The Internet era of Egypt has seen much fizzling and fading; not because the country can't yet quite keep up to par with international standards, but rather because they haven't quite got the final details in line.
"The market needs to be assessed carefully first," El- Gamal explains. "It's not simply a matter of taking the latest concept or technology and introducing it to the local market," he says. "It will never work that way. We need to start adapting things to suit the country and the culture."
He has a point. How, after all, could credit card-anchored e-commerce boom when only a fraction of the nation's minority held credit cards to their names?
Connect Ads, and the mini-empire surrounding it, have all that under control.
"We're taking online advertising for what it is, and not basing a company's future fortunes on its potential. That's part of the reason why some of the portals didn't take off. They thought advertising would bring in all the revenues," he says. "It's not realistic."
The online advertising element of LINKdotNET and the upcoming MSN Arabia, however, is given time, research and planning in its own right.
"Connect Ads functions as an entity in itself," El-Gamal explains. "Initially, it was set up to produce ads for our own site (link.net), but now we're selling ads to CNN, Hotmail and Maktoob."
Their role covers the expanse of developing online campaigns for clients; i.e. working with production houses such as IG to produce appropriate and catchy banners, and studying the product and market to determine the optimum placement of the ad.
"With this media type it isn't just enough to produce a graphically catchy ad. You have to place it right," El- Gamal stresses. "If your target audience is teenagers, it's useless putting your ad on Yahoo!'s! Opera page."
Right look and right placement notwithstanding, however, the Internet community still shouldn't expect online advertising to bring in millions -- of anything.
"The click-through rate of online ads is about one per cent," El-Gamal says, explaining the number of users who actually click on banner ads on any given site. "The public that has been introduced to online advertising has been disappointed over that figure."
To the public, he concludes, it is the mirror failure of the portal fiasco.
"Okay, so they have a point, one per cent doesn't sound like much," he compromises. "But it's still much higher that any other media. It's still that one per cent more than newspaper, television, or magazine ads. They don't have the option of clicking through. We have to bear that in mind."
The market is still young, though, and there is still much room for hope: hope that the locals will learn, and hope that the growth -- for both online ads and Internet development as a whole -- will continue; slowly, steadily, successfully.
"The online ad market is only a year old," its guru says. "Lots of educating needs to be done; to everyone in the IT sector, and the country as a whole. People need to understand how things work, and what to expect." They need to understand, for example, what it means to buy space for a banner ad.
"You buy impressions," El-Gamal explains. "A client comes and asks us to design a banner for X, and buy appropriate space for it. We create it, then buy, say, 100,000 impressions on a given site," he says. "An impression is one appearance of the ad on a screen. The price varies. It depends what site you're advertising on, and what type of ad space you've bought."
"Targeted ads" are more expensive than "run-off site ads", given that targeted ads do just what they say; target a specific audience. The Careeregypt.com banner, for example, appears in the mailboxes of thousands of Yahoo! Middle East users. The Yahoo! user profiles stipulate location, age, sex, and the likes, giving advertisers the perfect channel through which to narrow down ad appearances. Careeregypt.com bought its targeted ad space requesting the ad targets 20/30-something-year-old Arab and Egyptian users. Cost? Upward from $3,000-$4,000. Non-targeted space for 100,000 impressions would have cost less: approximately $2,000.
"We make our money off the supplier, not the client," El-Gamal says.
The suppliers in Egypt, though, still don't make that much.
"We prefer not to release figures on how much revenue comes into Link.net from ads, but for most portal-type sites, it's unrealistic to expect 50 per cent or more," he says. "Especially at this point."
Time, though, does change things.
"The biggest deterrent to the growth of e-commerce and the Internet revolution in Egypt was the size of the market. Now that's changing -- especially with the advent of free Internet at the end of the year, and the decreasing price of computers," he says optimistically. "The market will grow, as will e-commerce and Internet intelligence."
Naturally, as demand increases and the market expands, so too will the amount of revenue flowing in.
Until then, however, El-Gamal stresses the importance of keeping a varied revenue stream.
"We may have made money on the site from advertising the Sting concert, but we made much more by selling tickets," he says. "We sold more than 2,000 Sting tickets online. That's the classic revenue stream -- that's where you make most of your money at this early stage. We have about 2,000 visitors a day to our site -- that's 55,000 monthly. We have about 45 per cent of the market share, yet we still know not to rely solely on ads."
The key, then, is not to jump the gun and go too big, too loud, too soon.
"Online advertising is a great concept, and it can be used for many things," El-Gamal says. "Many clients use it as a testing ground for different ad concepts they want to use in other mediums. It's cheaper and more efficient, and the click-through results say a lot. People need to be educated, though. They need to really understand what it's all about and what it really does,"
They need to understand the fundamentals, he says, so that they don't feel the hype was popped with a pin again.
"Portals didn't fail," El-Gamal emphasises. "That's a misconception."
While locals may view the fading of the fizzle as a flop similar to the infamous world stock market crash, it was, in reality, more a matter of a new, hip stock that was slightly over-valued.
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