Advertisement, The American Heritage dictionary defines it as,

1. The act of advertising.
2. A notice, such as a poster or a paid announcement in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, designed to attract public attention or patronage.

Obviously, definition #1 still holds true. But definition #2 are somewhat questionable. Why? because it says “PAID ANNOUNCEMENT”. Apparently, this is not true. Consider the following…

The most Obvious one is probably Apple (don’t flame). Here I will focus on the iPhone

This was a post on Gizmodo (as stated) a while back. Here it clearly states that It had “free Advertisement”. Not only does apple get free advertisement, It also has a tradition of “hyping” their product.

So why does free advertisement exist? Well simply because of these reasons.

Reason #1: Blogs (News Service)

Most importantly Technological Web blogs. For example Engadget, Gizmodo, Tech Crunch, and many others (I am so biased…). These blogs generates massive ammounts of traffic everyday

These sites gives companies huge advertisement base. I am not saying that’s a bad thing. I mean we take pleasure in being nerdy right?
But it is not just these big web blogs, we the little people (and the even more little one, *me* XD) also generates some free advertisement. For example, Derek wrote a post on the Nokia N95 a couple days ago, and we enjoyed it. In a deep secret way (omg sounds like a stalker) Nokia loves this too. Not only does Nokia get free advertisement, they probably also gain a sense of accomplishment.
Not saying that this is a bad thing once again. (I would never post anything bad, right? Who knows? this is like my first post. well fine, maybe bad english.) I mean this site is generating free advertisement. It has links to Tech Crunch, Engadget, Gizmodo, and so forth.

Reason #2: Social websites. (Not Socialising)

Sites like DIGG and Del.icio.us, have a reputation on generating free advertisement. I mean there is something called the DIGG EFFECT. The advertisement is so big, it gets its own name and reputation of bringing a website to a crashing end (not always a bad thing). The good thing about these sites is that, they don’t just give advertisement to the big guy because of its base on the common people.

Reason #3: Socialising

When we comment on an article, we are probably leaving an address to our sites. (So next time you comment, make a good one so that people might be interested in what you have to say.) Now go on and make your own example, leave a comment =). Don’t flame to much please, I just started.

Conclusion

So what’s the point of all this? You don’t need fancy adspace to get traffic and noticed. All you need is a bit of luck and great content. Keep in mind though, some people refer to Free AD as spam. If you are one of these people there is a solution! Add a “nofollow” attribute to the link Or simply, use TinyUrl.

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