The desperate bid to rack up sales over the holiday season helped turn out a decent enough fourth quarter of 2008 for online advertising. Sure ads were down drastically from 2007, but it wasn’t quite as bad compared to the first three quarter of 2008, reports PubMatic, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that sells ad-optimization products.
The trillion-dollar question is: Was this a bottom or was it a momentary lull in hostilities brought on by a widening credit crunch? Some analysts think that this might be a blip and that most large Internet companies — such as Amazon (s AMZN), Yahoo (s YHOO), EBAY (s EBAY) — are going to see big declines in their revenue, though no such problems are being predicted for Google (s GOOG).
In my opinion, display ads are getting a bum rap. A couple of years ago, when cpms were outrageously high, it was hard to justify display. But, now, there’s so much cheap inventory out there, and nothing’s been proven to beat the reach of display, it’s time for marketers to go back to it.
While there may be some doom and gloom at the moment with online advertising budgets there is still going to be massive growth in the area in the coming years.
Online Digital Trackable Advertising is a major trend in the market place and at 8% saturation means it is approaching the strong growth in the S-Curve. It is predicted that it takes 50% of the time to reach 10% and the other 50% of the time to reach 90%. So far, roughly 10 years have passed with online advertising and that means that by 2020 we should be at or close to 90% of all advertising budgets using some or all online advertising for marketing.
There are many smaller players in the market that have not surfaced yet that are experiencing major growth such as Online Advertising FreeKii.com and as these grow and share the market for online advertising it skews the growth rate since they may not be included in top players for growth calculation.
The actual rate of growth in the next few years will be incredible and will make the last 10 years look pale in comparison. Remember the auto industry 100 years ago?