• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 16, 2005

I was having dinner this week with a colleague and we got to chatting about the six-year cycle.

The six-year cycle refers to the period of time it takes for Internet advertising elements to get hot again. In the 11-year history of Internet advertising we see that certain elements return about every six years. For example, in 1996-1997 the best place to put your money was in search. At the time, we were referring to banners within search inventory. In 2002-2003, search once again became the hot topic, but this time it was in reference to text-based advertising.

In 1997-1998 we spent a lot of money on ad networks. Now in 2005, ad networks are once again all the rage (a little more than six years, but work with me here). In the old days, ad networks were a great way to drive volume traffic via a reach-based opportunity. Ad networks aggregated millions of Web pages and you purchased based on category of topic or run of network. In 2005 the ad networks tout their optimization technology and the ability to drive effective cost per action using site side tags and automated systems. For those of you who were around, and especially for those of you who remember the Engage boondoggle in the Bahamas, this is a familiar cry to what Flycast was offering, though obviously updated and with newer, more reliable technology.

For those of you involved in blogging, you might allow your minds to drift back to the days when all the major portals were snatching up the self-publishing networks such as Geocities, Angelfire, and Tripod. Those networks were effectively graphical precursors to blogs that allowed the voice of the few to be heard by the minds of the many. It might seem vaguely familiar.

Of course, for every cycle that has come back around, there are a few that haven't, but is it possible that we may yet see them soon? What about "Push Media"? The age-old model of Pointcast deemed to be ineffective is being revisited by technologies such as Maven and Desksite. What about the browser wars? It used to be Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, but aren't we seeing round two with Internet Explorer and Firefox?

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of revisiting old ideas and identifying their strong suits so they may be applied to a new generation of technology to find a solution to an age-old problem. I believe in the concept of building off your predecessors. After all, without copying some of Elvis and The Beatles, you wouldn't have any of the bands you see today in popular music. Everybody ripped off their best aspects and made them their own. It's the model of evolution. I just think its fun to try and identify what the next trend will be in Internet advertising.

An old mentor of mine said, "If you want to know the next trend in advertising online, see what the adult sites are doing." He was right in that they did pop-ups before everyone else. They did redirects before everyone else. They did subscription models before everyone else. But now I think we've built enough history on our own to anticipate what the next trends will be. Just look back and see what worked in the past, what failed in the past, and merge the best aspects of them all together.

What do you see as the next big trend?