Media as today's main information sources unarguably have the power to influence political agenda-setting and public opinion. They decide which topics and issues are covered and how they are reported. Still, in many cases those decisions are not primarily determined by journalistic criteria, but affected by external factors. The importance of shareholders forces media to generate more profit every quarter, which can chiefly be raised by enlarging audiences and hence attracting more advertising money. Therefore the focus of media's programming in many cases shifts towards audience alluring content like entertainment, talk-shows, music and sports.
Further pressure regarding the selection of content occurs from advertisers and marketers, who often implicitly or explicitly suggest to refrain from programming which could show them or their products and services (e.g. tobacco) in an unfavorable light. Interlocking directorships and outright ownerships can moreover be responsible for a selective coverage. Financial connections with defense, banking, insurance, gas, oil, and nuclear power, repeatedly lead (commercial) media to the withholding of information, which could offend their corporate partners. In totalitarian regimes also pressure from political elites may be a reason for the suppression or alteration of certain facts.
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Although Web advertising becomes a significant portion of marketing budgets, advertisers are still unsure on how to unlock the potential of the Internet. Current findings show that:
- Consumer brands spend only a fraction of their advertising budget on on-line advertising.
- Technology companies spend five times more on advertising in the WWW.
- While banner campaigns are still popular, there is no standardized solution for on-line advertising.
- Ad pricing is based on CPM (costs per 1.000 visitors), rather than on results.
- Personalized targeting has not yet taken hold. Instead advertisers mainly target on content.
At the moment three dominant models are used for Internet advertising:
Destination Sites: They use entertainment, high production values and information to pull users in and bring them back again.
Micro Sites: Content sites or networks host small clusters of brand pages.
Banner Campaigns: Those include other forms of Web advertising like sponsorships.
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Automation is concerned with the application of machines to tasks once performed by humans or, increasingly, to tasks that would otherwise be impossible. Although the term mechanization is often used to refer to the simple replacement of human labor by machines,
As laid down in the proposed EU Directive on copyright and related