There was a time when advertising on a website consisted of having a banner designed and paying a website to display it. However, with Web 2.0, all of this has changed. In this article, I examine some of the advertising alternatives available.

Advertising on social networking websites such as FaceBook or MySpace allows advertisers to target potential customers effectively, but the way in which the ads appear remains fairly traditional. In most cases, ads appear as banners or smaller button ads. One more innovative approach that FaceBook uses is to pay to have ads included in a user's news feed. News feed ads are more subtle since they don't immediately look like advertising.

However, other social networking sites are coming up with more innovative advertising ideas. Many of these ideas are in their infancy and may prove to be effective at least in the short term.