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March 13, 2000

TechView:
A Wonderful Choice

Jeff Angus ne of the sterling business principles of the 20th century has been to find a profit that someone is making and take it away from them.

I've recently been working with an inventive new product that can increase productivity while trimming Internet bandwidth requirements. In the 21st century, big companies with lots of employees will be able to use this kind of product to take away others' profits as well. The product is WebWasher from Webwasher.com AG.

I've been testing the beta release of WebWasher version 2, and I love what it does. Turn on WebWasher and it stops your browser from downloading advertising, leading to cleaner, more readable, and, in most cases, faster pages. When it's used as a productivity tool, you can customize it to block advertising, animations, applets, scripts, and pop-up windows.

There are versions for client-side and server-side operation. Each works by putting a proxy server function between the page you're calling and your browser. It catches ads in a few ways--most important by using a database of strings and techniques used specifically in Internet advertising. Any user can customize WebWasher to stop additional ads; you can also customize it to let through certain ads that the product would normally stop.

The business case for this product is gigantic. It's a fact that people lose momentum when they're distracted. A person using the Internet for work, whether it's research or just reading news, is easily distracted by ads--that's advertising's whole reason for existence. Depending on the kind of person getting distracted, you can roughly predict the cost.

For high-concentration work such as programming, a study by DeMarco and Lister indicates that every interruption (an incoming phone call, a meeting, a sidetrack caused by changing subjects) costs an average of 20 minutes. The time loss for lower-concentration work is around half that. A study I did about 20 years ago showed employees lost eight to 15 minutes per interruption.

Preventing ads from showing up in the first place is a great technique to protect the focus of those trying to do their jobs; there's no techno-fix for those determined not to.

WebWasher lets you specify a graphic to substitute for the ad. If you want to reinforce certain behaviors ("No one may eat CFO Queeg's strawberries") or inform people about company events ("Quality circle meets in Cafeteria 6 at noon today"), you can hijack ad space with useful messages.

But this significant additional benefit could also prove to be a revenue booster for larger companies--you could actually rent your employees' eyeballs to advertisers, just like commercial Web sites. Say you were an automobile manufacturer with 300,000 employees. You might use a future version of WebWasher, an API-enabled one the company is considering, to substitute ads with other ads and charge advertisers for the privilege of advertising to your staff. If Webwasher.com doesn't make the product capable of that, someone else will.

Better productivity now or a fatter top line later--either way, it's a lovely choice WebWasher offers.

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