Online Advertising Coming Back: Search Surging

[andrewgoodman]

John Battelle picks up on some info from the IAB about the gradual resumption of interest in online advertising. Paid search spending is growing at a much faster rate than online advertising as a whole. The recent data show search makes up 40% of the total online advertising spend. Or should I say

40%!!!!!


MediaPost's coverage includes this:

With nearly $1 billion (947 million) in search ad spending, during the quarter, search accounted for 40 percent of all online ad spending, up from only 29 percent a year earlier.

As a result, conventional display advertising continued to erode in terms of share of online ad spending, declining to 20 percent from 23 percent in the second quarter of 2003.


We've known this was roughly the proportion for some time because this came to light in recent quarterly filings from Yahoo (on the overall impact of the Overture division on their ad revenues). But it's good to see confirmation.

As the line between "search" and "context" blurs, these numbers will be a bit tough to interpret going forward. But it's clear that "little ol' search" is on the rise and the rest of the ad business is still relatively stagnant.

Online is still a drop in the bucket as the overall advertising industry grows. Will this change anytime soon?

[Incubator]

Great post Andrew, good to hear. We are seeing a bigger increase you RFP's at this time of the year, much higher then last year at this time. I would like to see an overall growth in Canada yet, we are still far behind.Hopefully that time will come for both of us


PS. lets go for beers next time you are downtown Toronto and have some free time

Cheers

WC

[I, Brian]

Originally Posted by andrewgoodman

Online is still a drop in the bucket as the overall advertising industry grows. Will this change anytime soon?

It most certainly should - I imagine that once homes are more properly integrated to the net on a user basis - for example, through use of Microsoft's Media Center, and similar, the internet will not simply be the world's largest market place in name, but in practice, too.

I really feel the door of opportunity is closing for new entrepeneurs, though - the more heavily commercialised the internet becomes, I figure the less easy it will be for newer websites in the absense of a larger marketing budget.

[dannysullivan]

As the line between "search" and "context" blurs, these numbers will be a bit tough to interpret going forward.

Indeed, because as far as I can tell, they haven't broken contextual out of those figures at all. In my book, that makes calling them "search" meaningless.