On a personal level, like most people, I hope the site succeeds as any initiative which seeks to promote green living should be applauded. The trouble is that green websites, to date, haven’t been overly successful in attracting visitors. Despite the fact that the issues affect us all, and people increasingly discuss sustainability issues in the blogosphere, no site has tapped into this well enough to generate large enough numbers of visitors to attract the ad dollars of the mainstream advertisers.

Most of the leading green groups, which one would expect to do best online, such as the Energy Saving Trust, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Fairtrade Foundation still barely register a blip. A sustainable website that has stood out online, however, is Freecycle.org - a grassroots, nonprofit movement of people who exchange goods for free in their own towns with the aim of ‘reusing and keeping good stuff out of landfills’. Currently visited by over 200,000 Britons, it has experienced impressive growth this year.

The green offering from one of CNET’s fellow publishers, AOL’s ‘Go Green’ channel, perhaps gives a better clue as to the potential for smartplanet. It’s currently visited by almost 180,000 people – around one half of one percent of Britons online. Whilst this isn’t a number to be sniffed at, this number of eyeballs is probably only going to be of interest to targeted advertisers around specific green products.

However, advertising around niche interests or lifestyles is a key online theme this year. The plateauing of the large social networks, for example, whilst the niche-interest networks experience strong growth point to a ‘quality not quantity’ advertising focus as opposed to the large blind network buys.

By Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen Online