I guest-blogged at Adotas and posted an article (the bespectacled dog is me, I swear! thanks, Edward!) on the good and the bad with the state of online advertising. An excerpt:

Data and projections from the IAB, Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker, Jupiter Media, and eMarketer, among others, suggest that online advertising, having enjoyed reliably robust growth rates over the past 6 years, will see them shrink to zilch–optimistically–in 2009.

But behind the negligible overall growth figure lies two contrasting figures: continued growth in contextual/search advertising, and a slump in display. Looking at the previous online ad market slump, as well as the nature of today’s more complex market, provides indications on why this mixed picture stands, and when and how we can expect growth to resume.

Looking at the implosion of the online ad market in 2001, and its subsequent lengthy recovery is only partially instructive. The reality is that a number of factors make the state of today’s online advertising market different enough this time around to give credence to optimism. Search and contextual advertising exist now.

In contrast to the heady days at the turn of the millennium, the online ad market is much more complex today. Traffic patterns, strongly influenced by search, have changed, as has targeting sophistication. Contextual and search advertising is now a more than $10 billion business in the U.S. alone. Contextual- and behavioral-targeting technologies didn’t exist during Web 1.0; they are making more out of advertising dollars today.

Read the entire article at Adotas »

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.