10/20/97 USING WEB AD SPACE TO FIND MISSING KIDS

USING WEB AD SPACE TO FIND MISSING KIDS

SITES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB are certainly grabbing a lot of attention--some to the tune of millions of visitors per month. Pagecount Inc. of Catonsville, Md., is hoping to utilize all those eyeballs for an altruistic purpose: finding missing children.
The company provides a free software program that helps Web site operators count how many people visit their sites. The program puts a tiny digital counter--and an online ad from one of Pagecount's 15 advertisers--on the bottom of a Web page. But now, Pagecount has joined with a nonprofit group called Safeguarding Our Children-United Mothers (SOC-UM) to also use that ad space as an online missing-child alert system.
Once SOC-UM gets word of a missing child, Pagecount will replace one of the ads it sends out to some 160,000 Web sites with a picture of the child. The alerts will run for 24 hours, which Pagecount President Mark Burke says will reduce Pagecount's regular ad displays by about 10%. Viewers who click on the picture will be taken to SOC-UM's site (www.soc-um.org), where they can learn about the case and perhaps even lend a hand.
Burke says that when the first alert ran last April, more than 28,000 people clicked to get more information about Anthony Martinez, a 10-year-old boy abducted from his home in Beaumont, Calif. Unfortunately, the child eventually was found murdered and his killer remains at large.
BY PAUL M. ENG