Online Advertising Shows Publishers Where the Money Is
Sep 26th, 2006 by Dan Blank
A series of web advertising news this week. PaidContent reports on the state of internet advertising: a 37% increase year over year.
“Pete Petrusky, Director, Entertainment & Media Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers: “With the seventh consecutive quarter of growth behind us we are confident that the Internet will continue to reconcile the imbalances between its share of media consumption versus its relative share of total advertising spend.”
Detailed numbers can be found at the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Part of this boom in advertising is due to the innovative ways that people are experimenting with ads online.
Techmeme just launched a new ad system to its website. Doc Searls describes it this way:
“…[the] system involves feeds, turning each sponsored space into a branded feed portal… It provides a way for advertisers to put messages in spaces (or time blocks) in media. That it uses RSS is cool and modern and all; but hey, it’s still advertising.”
He goes on to talk about how advertising is inefficient and needs to focus more on the demand side of the equation. Good stuff.
Jeff Jarvis reviews Techmeme’s new ad system and concluded:
“It’s brilliantly simple.”
Dave Winer puts hits “innovation” into perspective by asking: “Will the sponsors actually have anything to say?”
Another site is launching a new video ad network:
“[VideoEgg] coordinates video for a growing group of online social networks and tools, including AOL, Bebo, Current TV, Dogster, hi5, Tagged, and Six Apart, delivering up to 20 million streams per day. The company’s tools help members of those sites quickly upload a variety of video formats with free bandwidth and storage.”
Monetizing the massive content of social networks is generating a lot of buzz, and I can’t help but wonder what the endgame will look like. As sites like YouTube and MySpace capture our imagination with the hundreds of millions waiting to be made, I wonder how this translates to smaller sites in more niche markets.