I have seen many changes in Internet advertising since the launch of internet.com in 1994. Our first banner ad was sold to MCI in early 1994. The sale was for a few thousand dollars for a banner on the internet.com homepage for a period of one month.

By late 1999 and into early 2000 banners started to fade. Opt-in email offerings and email newsletters appeared to be the future of online advertising. These two areas were growing rapidly for our company and I was sure that these two ad platforms were the killer applications of Internet advertising.

Fast forward to the present and we all know that opt-ins and email newsletters are also-rans and Search is the king of Internet advertising. However for Web sites that are not search-focused, the good old banner is still king. This is particularly true for companies like Jupitermedia that serves IT professionals.

Banner ad sales have been reasonably strong since the middle of 2003. But a curious thing happened to us starting with the acquisition of DevX in the summer of 2003.

DevX had blazed a trail and had become expert in selling ad campaigns that were built around intellectual creative versus normal traditional in-your-face banner ads. In other words the banner offered some benefit beyond "just getting product information."

By the end of 2003, Jupitermedia realized that the DevX model might well be "our" future best bet for selling online ads. Using the crackerjack team that came over with the DevX deal, we melded a plan to offer "DevX-like" campaigns for all of our sites and networks. The program is called GEMS (Guaranteed Effective Marketing Solutions), which was announced in a press release today.

As we complete 2004, we see a significant shift on the part of our mainstay advertisers to GEMS. Our ad revenues are up significantly for the year and our fourth quarter is extremely strong. Several companies have signed on for ad campaigns built around GEMS that heretofore had not wanted to advertise with Jupitermedia. While I cannot guarantee what will happen with ad revenues or GEMS in future years, I am fairly certain that this type of advertising is the future of banner advertising in the Tech space.

I believe a host of companies will attempt to copy our model. GEMS appears to be easy to emulate, but there are dozens of nuances associated with the concept that the DevX team mastered over five years of experimentation. Overall it is the editorial aspect of GEMS combined with significant readership that differentiates it from typical banner advertising campaigns.