Internet Marketing and Advertising Association website analysis

Business

Internet Advertising

What group sponsors the site and what is the organization's purpose?

There is absolutely no contact or other information on the group sponsoring this site at the site itself. A search of the group's name, Internet Marketing and Advertising Association, yields the information that the group is located in Rochester, New York, and is a group of businesspeople devoted to developing advertising alternatives for the Web. Other than that, the site itself yields no information, and even more perplexing, there is no contact or advertising information on the site, so it is difficult to see how businesses find out how to advertise on the site, or contact anyone to add their listing to the site. However, a search of "who is" at Internic.net indicates the registrant is "Ultimate Search" with a mailing address in Hong Kong. The.org indicates this is a non-profit Web site, so it seems the organization is not geared to making a profit, so it is quite difficult to determine exactly the purpose and goals of the organization. The "who is" registrant Web site is ultsearch.com, and that Web address results in a mirror site of the imaa.org site, so it seems the two sites are the same, and the.org status may be bogus at best. The site was last registered in June 2004, so perhaps the registrant bought the name from the original holder, or the domain expired and this registrant picked it up. Whatever the reason, it seems the original purpose of this organization may not be the purpose of the current domain holder.

Who is the intended audience(s) of the website?

The intended audience of this site is just about anyone who uses the Internet. While there are many links to advertisements for a variety of services, there are also general information links. Thus, the audience is quite varied, and can be quite wide to extremely specific. In addition, the site is user friendly, and the search engine is extremely easy to use, so the site is geared to the beginning Web user, who might not want to use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, but wants more specific results, without having to know exactly how to manipulate a search engine. The user can search for any word or combination of words, and the results are listed seemingly randomly, although they are in the same order each time they come up in the search results. Thus, a beginner could effectively utilize this site, and it seems that may also be a part of the targeted audience, as more sophisticated users might find this site a bit too cumbersome, especially since there is no way to alter the search results once they come up. (For example, the user cannot change the number of results per page, and so must page through many pages of links to find exactly what they are looking for.)

What services does the organization offer Web advertisers?

This organization offers Web advertisers the opportunity to sponsor a link to their Web site, with a short description of the site and what it offers.