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96 COMMUNICA TION THEORY
mass media. One of the reasons for the crash in dot.com stocks in 1999
was the failure of advertising on the Net as a revenue-generating exercise
(see Cassidy, 2002; Kuo, 2001). On the Internet, there is no mass, because
a mass is entirely constituted by broadcast media. Broadcast audiences
are built up over time, but they need to be reasonably synchronous with
regular visibility for advertisers to have any success. 8
The interactive sub-media of the Internet, like the World Wide Web,
cannot deliver a ready-made ‘mass’ to advertisers, and even when web-
sites are used in a companion role, their effectiveness is questionable.
Gauntlett (2000) points out that ‘modestly sized but inescapable adverts’
still appear on the World Wide Web and these ads can be personalized to
particular sites, but the solvency of web directories is overwhelmingly
derived from the promise of stock values, not from advertising revenue (7).
Chan-Olmsted (2000) observes that ‘the Internet is the most cluttered
medium in the world. To succeed in marketing an online brand, a marketer
most likely will need distribution of communication messages via mass
media to create broad awareness of the product or service’ (98). Direct
marketing ads are nearly always duplications of advertising ‘that has
come from channels outside the Internet, such as TV spots and infomer-
cials’ (98). Internet sub-media that allow consumers to personalize infor-
mation they want will only ever be a ‘valuable extension’ of traditional
media’ (100).
Thus, broadcast advertisements often include a World Wide Web
address, so that ‘the consumer can continue a brand relationship initiated
in an ad in an established medium and extend it to a closer relationship
on the Net’ (100). The fact that such sites might get a large number of
visits is already driven by mass marketing. However, web proprietors
(portal providers and search engine companies) have vigorously tried to
aggregate web advertising in terms of portal loyalty strategies. In what
has been called a game of ‘portalopoly’, ‘Internet companies are racing to
build sites (known as portals) that serve as hubs or gateways to the larger
internet’ (Buzzard, 2003: 205). Portals function like the mass circulation
magazines or TV networks: ‘They are sites that meta-aggregate content
and offer a range of services in order to be the home page for as many
users as possible, thereby attracting more advertising revenue’ (Buzzard,
2003: 205). However, as we shall see below, contra Buzzard (2003: 206),
these hubs, lacking liveness, performativity and specular visibility, fail to
provide a mechanism for audience constitution.
On the Internet, the technical nature of its sub-media means it is not
possible to be a broadcaster in the same way as it is with mass media. Yet,
it is on the basis of a deception, or at least a sociologically uninformed
view, that broadcasters in the USA are lobbying to have ownership and
control laws relaxed in the wake of the Internet (cf. McChesney, 2000).
Because anyone can publish content on the World Wide Web, they argue
that media monopolies have been rendered ineffectual and so restrictions
on owning television, radio and print outlets should be lifted.