One of the main questions concerns the origin of editorial publishers. For the moment, and for a little while yet there are no major hurdles to be overcome. At present any individual with a computer and a reasonably large website can declare himself a publisher and launch a new publication. This situation may only continue until the principal players in the world of communications decide to invest heavily in electronic communications, and in a strategic way. It would be illusory to imagine that the current state of grace from which cyber-businessmen benefit, will last. Creating a professional website is expensive. It costs even more, as the total cost of running a website for a year has been estimated at three times the initial set-up cost, and this relationship will increase in the coming years. Why ? As we will discover later in this book, the creation of a website cannot be haphazard; it's important to do market research beforehand in order to create a relevant service, to train the partners who will manage the site or supply editorial, to promote the site in order to attract visitors, to analyse the number, the profile and the profession of its visitors, to change its content ... and all these factors cost considerable sums. Thus, publishing information on Internet in a professional context is not available to everyone, and in time a good number of amateur sites will disappear or become virtually invisible (not having the means to make themselves known). But this doesn't mean that the individual won't have a place in supplying information to challenge professional publications. Thus, it is perfectly possible to imagine a situation in which the number of very specialised sites increases, containing knowledge which is specific, if not unique, to their creators (the genetic makeup of Spanish oranges, everyday life in the northern part of the 15th arrondissement, Eastern countries' exports to Europe ...). Who will publish this information ? The number of consultants in every sector increases every day. Thus, an integral part of a consultant's work is to develop his market visibility (to make himself known to his potential clients) with a limited budget. The Web can be a good market in this respect, where the consultant can promote himself by publishing useful information (thus proving his competence in his field). Various problems occur in this hypothesis : this consultant's site must be known on Internet in order to be visited. One solution could be grouping consultants together on the same site to take advantage of the effects of synergy. Besides, communication experts would argue that this type of information offers little guarantee of reliability, and that the content can only be changed with the same amount of care as a professional publication, etc. In addition, the hard economic reality is there to remind us that Internet is a difficult world : the fact that the excellent magazine 'Cyberspheres' ceased publication at the end of 1996 illustrates perfectly that only economically viable projects have a future on Internet (even if, for the moment, we have relatively few criteria for judging this viability). Besides, other categories of players are likely to enter the market. They may come from completely unexpected backgrounds, as the following analysis will try to show.

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