Home  › Media › Media Planning Adam Posman  Profitability in
Publishing    |  August 2, 2001   |  Comments  There was a lot
of feedback from my last article, which discussed how major
search engines have been forced toward alternative revenue
sources. Many of them have found success in offering paid search
results to advertisers, a service that has created great demand
from advertisers and profits for publishers.  In the eyes of
many users, search engines are providing biased search results
and misleading users by guiding them to the marketers' sites
rather than to those providing the content they are looking for.
This is an ethical dilemma that has stirred interest even among
consumer groups and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Many are against the service altogether, but the majority argue
that sponsored links can play a role with search engines so long
as they are clearly designated as being advertisements rather
than natural content.  Clearly, in the radically changed world
of Internet publishing