Advertising spending on-line is growing at a frightening rate in the UK, being forecast to grow by 30.8% to £3.4 billion this year. That compares with television advertising which will grow by just 1% to around £3.56 billion by the end of 2008. It is almost certain to exceed television spending by the end of 2009, according to Group M, a media buying and planning group who are well qualified to know these things. It's a prospect that fills me with dread, quite frankly.

On the one hand, it does underline my message that on-line is the place to be if you want to do business. You have to exploit this medium. But on the other, as a user myself, I am constantly irritated by the advertising. It is so invasive, it takes up screen space of course, plus it is a distraction, and it slows down the whole process of surfing the web. Advertising has already ruined the fun of watching television, you only get to watch programmes in chunks of a few minutes before they go to commercials. So if that's the yardstick, how bad is it going to become on-line?

The issue with on-line ads is how they arrive on your screen. You go to a web site and after a short delay the page starts loading, which is to be expected. But it is only after it has started loading that your browser sees code for the advert, and it is only at that point that it can then poll for that advert from wherever it is being served. So you have to wait for that as well, a further delay probably as long as the first wait. Depending on how the page you're looking at is set up, you may be unable to see it properly until the advert has been downloaded.

Until recently there were two major players in this game, Google, of course, and Doubleclick which most people have never heard of. The fact these two were in competition meant there was a serious effort to out-perform each other. Not any more, there isn't. Back in April 2007 Google agreed to buy them out for $3.1 billion in cash. That deal was only finalised last month after the European Union ruled it was not in breach of anti-trust regulations. Already Google have started laying off Doubleclick staff. I predict the service from both of these sources will become markedly worse in the near future as computing capacity and bandwidth are cut back.

How should this affect you and your web site?

The buzz-word is "monetizing". Everyone is saying that the thing to do is to add Google ads to your web site and each time someone clicks on one, you get a few cents. Of course those cents add up when you get thousands of clicks per month, but the harsh reality is only a small percentage of visitors actually click on any of these ads. So you need tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of visitors to get a few thousand click-throughs.

Seriously, how many visitors do you think you're going to get on your business web site? Unless you make a concerted effort to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of having them click on the ads, you're not going to earn pots of money from displaying them. And to get that traffic, you're probably going to have to tune the whole content of the site to suit search engines from where you hope to draw your traffic.

And what of your business objectives? My advice is to keep your business web site focused on what your business is about. Keep it geared towards serving the needs and interests of your clients. You don't even want the visual distraction that displaying these ads can be on your pages. Instead, pay some other site a few cents to display your ads and drive some serious prospects your way. You can do that with Google as well.

You can certainly explore other methods of "monetizing" your web site, I'm not entirely against the principle. My personal favourite is to sign up with Amazon and feature some selected books, as I have done on this site if you look at the recommended reading link. The point here is that you are offering useful information, information you believe is relevant to your visitors, and information that you hope will enhance your site as a resource.