In a 2nd Circuit Court decision last year, six freelance writers won a case against New York Times, Newsday and Time for copyright infringement. Their work was re-sold as digital content on a CDROM and later published on web.

Their claim that they did NOT relicense their work for use on web or in digital compilations and were entitled to compensation when that content was re-sold was accepted by court in a judgement against original publishers of that content.

Many writers online offer their articles "Free" for use on web, in ezines or in ebooks available online. But in fact are being paid by publishers by requiring that "resource boxes" be used, such as four line blurb following this article. This is, in fact, a form of payment and is agreed to by those writers in exchange for traffic, publicity, subscriptions and exposure gained when readers visit authors web site, subscribe to their ezine or see advertise- ments run for a fee on their web site.

"Content" is proliferating, professional "paid" writers work is becoming less valuable online and some professionals are shouting, "ENOUGH! We want to be paid for our work!"

The latest published figures seem to suggest that average click-thru-rate (CTR) for a banner ad on Internet is between 0.15% and 0.3%. That is 1.5 to 3 per thousand.

Why is that such a surprise? Can you remember last time you clicked on a banner ad? I certainly can't.

Yet businesses are still putting banners up. Are they just kidding themselves?

In same way that big businesses will buy endless TV spots or radio ads to get their name better known, so too are banner ads used as a branding medium. These campaigns, where response is only a secondary aim, bring average CTRs down considerably.

In offline advertising world, Direct Response advertising is thriving. Ads that solicit a measurable action - call this number, fill this coupon, visit this web site - are growing as a percentage of total. The reason is simple. Every measurable response lets advertiser learn more about mix of media on his schedule. Newspaper A pulls more calls than newspaper B - then lets drop 'A' from plan and try out 'C'.

This constant learning and refining should be practiced online as well, but how many do it? The overall CTR is further damaged by too many banners being bought on wrong sites, and staying there too long.

An advantage that offline media planners have is sheer volume of research into audiences of every advertising medium you can think of. So before a single dollar is spent, they know that their ads will be seen by most appropriate people.

Not so online. Yet. In a large number of cases, banner ads are bought and sold in bulk. For every perfect site you buy, several others may be included in 'the package'. This arbitrary approach will decline if sites are forced to audit both size and composition of their audiences before advertisers will buy from them.

Making a successful banner campaign depends on four factors:

1. Ensuring that audience of site you advertise on is as closely matched as possible to your own. Not just in terms of age and socio-demographics, but also in attitude. Wastage is useless, and expensive.

2. Advertising on popular sites that people are likely to have bookmarked. One of reasons many people resist clicking on banners is because they know they will be taken away from site they are viewing to someplace they may not want to be. Highly bookmarked sites are easy to find again.