Since there are some people in this world who don’t even watch television at all anymore, what has been the new frontier of advertising in the World Wide Web is now somewhat of a standard. It used to be extremely inexpensive to run marketing and advertising campaigns on the internet, but that has since changed.

Try contacting the mere publisher of a first-page ranked blog to request a quote for placing an ad with them and your eyes might pop out, if of course you’re not too familiar with the online advertising game already. If you thought advertising on television was expensive, which in fairness still is, then you’ll probably think advertising online is just as expensive, if not more expensive since there are so many parameters which can contribute to escalated costs.

The escalated costs are essentially dictated to by the fact that premium advertising space on the internet is basically up for auction and not on sale outright. It’s more about by how much you can outbid the current highest bidder, something which is somewhat of a core business model of Google’s advertising program (AdSense and AdWords).

So no, the future of advertising isn’t necessarily the internet itself – that’s the present. The future of marketing and advertising is a specific corner of the internet officially referred to as social networking. Even the social networks themselves are catching on to this migration towards their platforms as the most efficient and direct marketing channel, so the biggest of them have put measures in place to capitalize on that.

Brands for example no longer have to go through the rigorous process of contacting a famous personality through their agent and facilitating a deal through their own marketing division. Now brands go directly to what are referred to as influencers and simply offer them remuneration for their endorsement of the product or service they’re selling, but that’s representative of more direct cases. More indirect deals of this nature would have the celebrity or influencer simply showing them to align themselves with the whole brand instead of a specific product or service.

Here’s the thing though – you wouldn’t necessarily have to be a well-known public figure to become a so-called influencer. It’s all about the numbers associated with your social networking account as this is what brands look at when they lick their lips at the prospect of tapping into a very targeted potential market. I mean it would make perfect sense to advertise a new release of soccer cleats to the followers of a Twitter page such as that of a global freestyling brand known as Sambafoot, would it not? How much more targeted can you get than that?

It gets very interesting however, with many little sub-markets developing peripheral to the facilitation of social media marketing relationships. For example, I’m not sure if it’s still as prevalent as it previously was, but you can buy Facebook “likes” and Twitter “followers” to boost your value as a potential influencer, then again on the other hand there are entire agencies dedicated to the validation of the authentication of the suggested following which potential candidates to be so-called influencers have.