Websites

The advertising of products, services or propaganda through websites is a relatively new idea of advertising due to the fact that the internet has only been around since the mid 1990s. However, the reach of the internet to the masses has increased exponentially since then and in the present day, the convenience of viewing advertisements on the internet can be considered only second to the television. One of the main differences between television commercials and websites is that websites are rarely employed to distribute propaganda because of the diversity and multitude of the world wide web that render propaganda ineffective.

There are many forms of advertising on the web, for example:
  1. Adware, Pop-up programs and Spam e-mail
  2. Google Adsense and similar online advertisement-search engine services
  3. Website Banners/icons
  4. Youtube, MySpace and similar video websites that can show video clips like television commercials

Adware and Pop-up programs and plant themselves onto downloaded software and frequently pop up to remind the user about the advertised product(s), employing a propaganda-like strategy by emphasising and re-emphasising the pros of the advertised product. Spam e-mail serves almost the same purpose with the exception these e-mails are sometimes used to trick the targets with viruses and other undesirables like Spyware. These means of advertising are not very effective because many people find these Adware programs/e-mails annoying and some of them even go out of their way to specially get rid of these programs, thus making this form of advertising counter-productive.

Google Adsense shows similar matches to a particular search word that the web-user searches for in the Google search engine, enabling the user to find supplementary items that he might be interested in. Google Adsense is effective because it can be found on almost any website. This is because it is free for anybody to install a Google Adsense toolbar on their website or webpage. Google entices people to install their Adsense toolbar because monetary rewards are offered if enough people click on the Google Adsense links on their website. However, each Google Adsense toolbar shows a random selection of links, thus, it is not a very reliable way to advertise a particular product or service.

Although website banners are specific to the target audience, however, they are not propagated widely enough to be very effective in advertising a particular product. Moreover, they are usually found on the company's homepage itself, and do not widen the scope and increase the rate of being communicated to.

Youtube, MySpace, Google Video, iFile and Metacafe are some of the more popular websites where videos can be uploaded for public viewing. These websites are effective because they are open to the widest range of internet users, however, they require that the internet user manually searches for the particular topic or title of the subject or video before they can be shown.