Review: How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway

by Laurence A Canter and Martha S Seigel

I had some difficulty in deciding how, or indeed, whether to review this book. Its authors, Canter and Seigel, have become notorious across the Internet as the proponents of intrusive digital advertising, thanks to their repeated posting of an advertisement for their legal services across most of Usenet, the Internet’s main discussion area.
This book was written to justify their actions and to explain to the non-technical business person how to follow in their footsteps. As such, it is viewed by many in that community as an irresponsible, even wicked book.

Canter and Seigel in their turn do little to endear themselves to their critics - the book repeatedly refers to regular users of the internet, even those they turned to for help in putting their business online, as “geeks” and “smart alecks” and those who opposed them as “vandals” and “self-appointed dictators”.

I am naturally reluctant to give such an inflammatory book any further publicity, especially when much of it is wrong-headed, but inevitably there are many who will be tempted to buy it regardless,attracted by its garish title, the fashionableness of its subject or the notoriety of its authors.

Canter and Seigel’s case, simply put, is that the Internet is not a community whose codes of practice one should adhere to - it is just a medium of communication and advertising on it the way they did (selling help in getting American citizenship across groups discussing everything from programming to fishing) should not be banned because free speech is protected under their constitution. In their words, “in true communist countries, advertising is not allowed except by the government who owns everything. Maybe it’s worth more of a fight than you thought.” Junk mail and junk faxes are not illegal, and viewing unwanted ads costs the recipients just a few pennies worth of online time, and much of the internet is full of “junk” chatter in any case. They claim that by spending $10 worth of online time sending their message, they had had 20,000 enquiries and received $100,000 worth of new business, demonstrating that the “silent majority” doesn’t oppose advertising.

Unfortunately, their very success is the reason that their approach is wrong. As they point out, advertising on the Internet is “the business bargain of the century.” While a 30 second national advert on a top-rated soap opera in the US would cost $45,000 and deliver 4.4 million households, a leased line, full-time connection to the Internet would cost $1,000 and can be used to get a message to a potential audience of 30 million. If nobody balked at unsolicited advertising on the Internet and it was initially found to be profitable it would quickly grow out of control. It’s true that ignoring a few advertisements randomly inserted in one’s electronic mail and discussion groups isn’t costly, but millions of businesses, small and large, joining the Internet could so fill up people’s screens with ads that cost next to nothing to send that weeding out useful information would be next to impossible.

That isn’t to say that there is no place for business promotion on the Internet at all, of course. As Canter & Seigel point out, the common and approved way to advertise is to monitor discussion groups relevant to your business and comment or answer questions, bringing your product or service into the public gaze in the process. Those who are inspired to find out more about your company can then easily email a representative or check out a public information archive you make available on the Internet. Thus, on the Internet, advertising gives way to marketing and public relations.

If you leave aside their justification of indiscriminate advertising, the core of the book - explaining the Internet and how to exploit it commercially, is well-written and informative. It explains in layman’s terms how to get your company connected, what each of the main Internet services are and how each of them can be adopted for commercial use. It comes up with several useful suggestions for businesses which lend themselves to promotion across the Internet and it even provides good, if jaundiced summaries of the Internet’s “codes of practice” while encouraging you to ignore them. They publish their own suggested guidelines for advertising at the end of the book, which, interestingly, are much more restrictive and sensible than those they spend much of their time setting out. In fact, the advertising that got them in such hot water

Because they are laymen themselves, they occaisionally get things wrong, because they are writing for Americans, the prices they quote can only give a British readership a rough idea of its costs, and because the book was written last year it doesn’t offer enough information about the World Wide Web. Nonetheless, if it weren’t for its jaundiced point of view, it could be a useful book for the would-be Cyberspace salesman.