www.yale.com?

By Joseph Law and Wendee Shinsato

Thou shalt not have advertisements on any web pages located on the Yale server. Thus has commanded ITS (Information Technology Services), the controlling authority for Yale's electronic network. For student web pages, this means no banner advertisements nor any other activity that could be considered commercial.

While this policy does not affect most students, it does have ramifications for student organizations with web pages, most notably publications, that could otherwise generate revenue by advertising online. Both The Yale Daily News and The Yale Herald have considered switching to commercial sites to be able to carry online ads.

ITS has spoken

Philip Long, director of Academic Computing Services, does not deem online ads appropriate for Yale's web server. "Such individual commercial enterprises do not likely offer institutional support of Yale's educational or research mission and thus would not be appropriate to support with institutional web services and resources," he said.

This policy was strictly ITS's decision; advertising on educational web sites (sites that end in EDU) is not illegal, and some college newspaper web sites on EDU domain, like Harvard's The Crimson, carry ads. Duane Stone, who works for the Registration Services of InternNIC, the agency in charge of registering domain names, said, "There may be local administration rules at the college/university that prohibit it, but if they don't care, we don't care...What people do with the registered names is up to them."

ITS bans advertising on the Yale web site for two reasons. Yale wants there to be no appearance of commercial activity on its site in order to emphasize that it is an independent educational institution. Long said, "Our primary services and facilities are dedicated to education and research activities by University mission and, to some degree, by tax and other law." Secondly, Yale's ISPs (Internet Service Providers, the companies that connect Yale's network to the Internet) charge Yale a non-profit rate, and therefore prohibit using the Yale network for back-door connections to non-Yale sites. Long said, "In most cases overt commercial activities are non-Yale by definition and would violate our ISP agreements."

www.yaledailynews.com?

The Yale Daily News (YDN) and The Yale Herald have each considered obtaining a commercial site which would carry online advertising. ITS has made it difficult for the papers to advertise on their existing sites by vetoing a number of options, including having a page automatically refresh to a commercial site. YDN editor-in-chief Kevin O'Connell does not begrudge ITS for its policy. He said, "Although it presents an obstacle, I feel that the policy is justified in that the university must hold to it if it is to maintain its educational status on its server."

The newspapers themselves are concerned that switching to a commercial server will make their sites less accessible to alumni and others. Furthermore, it is unclear if online ads would offset the costs of obtaining a commercial site. O'Connell said, "We haven't decided to change [to a COM site] because we haven't worked out how much money switiching would bring us relative to the cost of signing on to a commercial server." Herald publisher Fabián Rosado has made "the argument [to ITS] that we're a nonprofit organization, and the funds are just to pay for the newspaper, so why not? Why should online ads be different from print ads? The answer, however, remains no."

Beyond Yale's walls

Some publications at other colleges are unhampered by the restrictions found at Yale. Like The Crimson, both The Bradley Scout (of Bradley University), and The Bucknellian (of Bucknell University) have their web pages hosted on the web servers of their respective colleges, yet they also carry online ads. Amy Cerda of The Bradley Scout said, "We encourage advertising on our website. The same policies that are in effect for our print ads apply for our online ads."

In their quest to garnish the potential revenue from online ads, publications that are not allowed to advertise on their school servers have resorted to changing the location of their web pages from EDU domains to COM domains. Southern Illinois University's Daily Egyptian is an example. Lance Speere, Egyptian faculty managing editor said, "Because of low maintenance and production cost, [advertising] is profitable. It is beneficial for the users of our site. And there was a demand for it." Other newspapers simply wished to avoid the hassles of using their university's web servers. Jesse Vanek, online editor of Framingham State College's The Gatepost, said that "we felt it would be much easier to purchase the domain ourselves and deal with it completely independently without having to wade through bureaucratic red tape." The Gatepost's site does not carry ads.

'We would need 500,000 page hits per month.'

As The Gatepost example shows, online advertising is not right for all college newspapers. Soliciting online ads requires either paying for an ad agency or much research and work for the newspaper staff itself. Moreover, not all publications' web sites get enough visits to warrant the work. Will Stevenson, online editor of The Daily Princetonian News, said that an ad agency they approached "said we would need like 500,000 page hits per month to be saleable to advertisers."

While there are companies willing to pay for online advertising, at present such a market is relatively small. Some publications have found that the revenue brought in through online ads isn't enough even to pay for themaintenance of their web pages. According to Demian Warner, business manager of UC Davis's California Aggie, advertising is presently only sufficient to pay for their connection cost.

The Cornell Sun, which went online in the fall of 1996, is now earning $500 a month from its web site. Eric Sullender, the Sun's web manager, said, "It took a while. This is probably due to the fact that the site is relatively new and we had to establish our 'hit' numbers. Also, from what I've heard, the Internet advertising business is relatively slow."

The Yale Daily News and The Yale Herald, which may have advertising on their sites soon, certainly hope that will change.

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