Following a spate of internet service provider price hikes in recent weeks, companies offering free internet access – and there are not many – feel they have one of the brightest windows of opportunity right now. Cincinnati, Ohio-based Tritium Network, a free access ISP that is a subsidiary of the InterAd Group, has a patent-pending banner advertising technology called AdPath that places ads across the bottom of every screen either in email or web browsing and the advertising pays for the user’s internet access. Ads rotate every 30 seconds based on user demographics. The payback comes when users fill out a comprehensive form once a month answering questions and detailing their hobbies and interests and future buying intentions. The demographic and buying intention part of the information is passed on to Tritium’s advertisers, but founder, president and CEO Michael Lee says all personal information will remain confidential, and points out that no credit card information is ever required. He also notes that the company does not employ cookies and says the technology will only track what users do within the inch-high ‘ticker tape’ window the AdPath technology displays. It also enables users to go back and forth between adverts if they feel so inclined. At present Tritium has just 10,000 or so users, but expects that to jump to one million by this fall, three million a year later and between six and nine million by 2000, which is some growth rate. The service has rolled out in Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, New York and will hit San Francisco next week. Lee expects to reach 93 percent of the US population by the fall. He was reluctant to identify backbone providers but one of them is thought to be GTE. The company also cannot reveal the names of its advertisers just yet, but Lee says they are from all types of consumer markets including automotive, finance, credit cards, apparel and publishing. Advertisers pay a cost per thousand view rate of $40 and about 50 are thought to have signed up thus far. A similar venture by HyperNet never got much beyond 10,000 users before folding last year. Tritium’s is a similar model to that employed by Juno Online Services, except that provides only email and requires a special Juno client. Lee says Tritium works with all browsers and most email clients. He sees it more in terms of the success enjoyed by HotMail Corp, which offered a free email address, but no access and signed up millions of ‘subscribers’ before selling out to Microsoft Corp at the start of this year. As for the obvious bandwidth problems such a service could cause, Lee claims the AdPath technology solves this by using push technology techniques similar to that employed by the likes of Marimba Inc and others. Lee did not detail the technology but it sounds to us like Marimba’s fractional differencing technology, which only updates those parts that have changed. Lee said it keeps communications between the client and server down to a minimum and upgrades automatically. http://www.tritium.net
