Jason Calcanis has a terrific post tracking trends in Web advertising. He's absolutely right—we're at the beginning of a boom, as advertisers shift from traditional media to the Web. Advertisers have been very slow to understand the impact of the Web, but it's starting to happen, with some big mainstream advertisers like Budweiser starting to make significant online commitments.
This, in turn, provides the answer to one of the biggest fears about the shift to the Web from traditional media: How can you afford to fund fullscale news operations when online advertising revenue is a fraction of the dollars going to print or broadcast counterparts? Well, yeah, it is a fraction—now. In a few years, as dollars shift in a big way between traditional and new media, the economics will be very different, and online news operations gradually will become truly self-supporting.
This is going to involve new kinds of online advertising and new kinds of online advertisers, but it will happen as the advantages of online media become clearer and advertisers adjust their spending accordingly. It's a scary transition, but Calcanis' chart and comments indicate that it's happening.
New, new thing + not controllable:
Losing "control" when one's ad might be next to a neagative comment or actually inspire less-than-positive posts, plus the newness on the net to many... goes to the core of our human fears...perhaps each industry wil lreach its own tipping point as a competitor is successful online and the others ("me too") rush to keep up. I trust you are enjoying your new/old world of post-backfence consulting.
It seems the new normal world is now a moving target
another fan of your blog
Posted by: Kare Anderson | November 16, 2006 at 03:12 PM